Small Entrepreneurship, Knowledge and Social Resources in a Heavy Industrial Territory. The Case of Eco-Innovations in D
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Small Entrepreneurship, Knowledge and Social Resources in a Heavy Industrial Territory. The Case of Eco-Innovations in Dunkirk, North of France Sophie Boutillier 1
Received: 31 May 2016 / Accepted: 3 November 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2017
Abstract The objective of this paper is to analyze the capacity of the small entrepreneur to innovate and especially eco-innovations. The entrepreneur is a social agent embedded in a given territory and a local community (work, family, school, and so on) from which he is identified by three types of resources: knowledge, financial, and social resources; we will define more analytically their role in this text and, especially, the key role of knowledge and social resources (informal social network). We interviewed 50 small entrepreneurs in the town of Dunkirk, a Bheavy industrial area in crisis^, located in the North of France, to identify which resources (in knowledge, financial, and social resources) they are using to develop eco-innovations (new products and technologies). Keywords Entrepreneur . Eco-innovation . Small enterprise . Territory
Introduction Innovation is the engine of economic growth and social change (Nelson and Winter 1982; Schumpeter 1911, 1942; Freeman and Louça 2001). Scholars usually study this topic in relation to large firms (Galbraith 1967; Chandler 1977) and the role of small and medium enterprise (Julien 1993; Audretsch 2006). The process of innovation in small enterprises is rarely studied. According to Schumpeter (1942) or Galbraith (1967), the activity of small enterprises should disappear, faced with the threat of industrialization and automation during the nineteenth and twentieth century, in opposition to Penrose (1959). We define small entrepreneurship by three main characteristics: (1) these entrepreneurs employ a small number
* Sophie Boutillier [email protected]
1
University of Littoral, CLERSE (UMR-CNRS, 8019), Research Network on Innovation, Dunkerque, France
J Knowl Econ
of workers (up to 10 generally), (2) they develop their activity in low technological sectors (retail business, carpentry, plumbing, and so on), and (3) they create their enterprise where they live, generally to create their own job. Moreover, the activity of small enterprises is linked in many cases to local economic and social development, forming Bindustrial districts^ (Marshall 1890), where big enterprises also play an important role. Small entrepreneurs are embedded in a given territory where they extract resources that they valorize, thanks to their social network (formal and informal) (Granovetter 1985). On the other hand, many researchers emphasize the positive role of the territory in promoting innovation, regarding synergic and positive links between the enterprise and the territory where they are embedded (Marshall 1890; Becattini 1990; Boutillier et al. 2016). They base their analysis on synergic relations between large and small enterprises (generally startups), but they do not say anything ab
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