Análisis de redes de los proyectos de innovación europeos “Leonardo da Vinci”: un ensayo empírico preliminar

[Castellano] En este trabajo se realiza un ensayo empírico preliminar de los proyectos de innovación europeos “Leonardo da Vinci”. La metodología que se utiliza a lo largo del trabajo es el análisis de redes. Se observan grafos e indicadores de redes y se comparan la situación de los agentes que forman las redes. Además no solamente se analiza la situación de los agentes, sino la similitud y causalidad estructural existente entre las redes que conforman dichos proyectos. Este ensayo empírico preliminar da lugar a una futura modelización o a la aplicación de la metodología en otras materias.

Internationalisation of SMEs : European comparative studies

We examine new research on the internationalisation of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in 27 European countries. We find that, in both established market economies and in transition economies, SME international entrepreneurship is driven by internal resources and capabilities, membership in networks or clusters, favourable government policies, economy, competitive market conditions, and industry structure. We then develop a conceptual model and propositions of the drivers of European SME internationalisation. Our findings have important implications for managers in improving their firms' international market performance.

Policy drivers of international entrepreneurship in Europe

The diversity of countries and cultures in Europe necessitates an international outlook for most businesses. This paper examines the internationalisation of business in Europe through a literature review on international entrepreneurship theory. The role of the individual business owner and of business and interorganisational activity in facilitating the internationalisation of businesses in Europe is discussed by utilising the theoretical framework of international entrepreneurship and by putting forward three main propositions. The main aim and intent of this paper is to understand how the policies of individual governments and institutions such as the European Union help businesses in Europe to internationalise, with particular emphasis on businesses in the Baltic region. The paper discusses policy implications and suggestions for future research, which highlight the importance for firms in Europe of focussing on international markets.

Entrepreneurial Inclination and Entrepreneurship in Hungary and in Europe

The lecture has two parts. The first part – based upon Eurobarometer data - briefly investigates the proportion and social characteristics of potential entrepreneurs in European comparative perspective. It proves that the Hungarian data are close to the European average. The second part – based on Hungarian panel data (1992-2007) - examines the predictive force of entrepreneurial inclination upon future entrepreneurial career and well-being. The results reveal that potential and actual entrepreneurship have strong social similarities and lasting connections despite the great volatility of both. Entrepreneurial inclination and more concrete plans have influenced the entrepreneurial career chances with nearly identical force, without cancelling each other’s effect. Entrepreneurial motivation has also to do with subjective well-being. The “push” factors of initial dissatisfaction with work and material conditions have lost their significance while the connection between entrepreneurial inclination and satisfaction with future perspectives persists in the longer run. The matrix of original motivation and further career provides a typology of four economic actors: that of “conscious” employees, “blocked”, “forced” and „conscious” entrepreneurs.

Culture as a driver of entrepreneurship : contrasting independent entrepreneurship versus employee entrepreneurship

Principal Topic Counties in Northern Europe, such as Sweden, Finland and Denmark, have comparatively low per capita rates of entrepreneurship as measured by independent new venture start-up rates – as for example measured by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) rate. However, the latest 2011 GEM data reveals that these same countries have comparatively very high Employee Entrepreneurship Activity (EEA) rates – that is a high rate per capita of employees involved in new product development or new enterprise activities. This observation has prompted us to investigate the role of national culture in driving independent versus employee entrepreneurial activities. Prior research has established that national (and regional) culture plays an important role in forming an “entrepreneurial culture” that encourages (or discourages) independent business start-ups and TEA (e.g. Davidsson, 1995; Beugelsdijk, 2007). However, the relationship of culture and EEA has not received research attention. Moreover, empirical relationships between elements of national culture and independent entrepreneurship have revealed some surprising results. For example, Wildeman et al. (1999) report an unexpected higher share of individual business ownership in countries that have higher uncertainty avoidance, higher power distance and lower individualism according to Hofstede’s dimensions of culture. They speculate that dissatisfaction can be a source of entrepreneurship: in countries with a high power distance, a high uncertainty avoidance and low individualism, there may be relatively more business owners since enterprising individuals cannot satisfy their needs within existing organizations. Yet it remains a rather open question whether entrepreneurial behaviour in existing organisations provides a satisfactory explanation for these empirical findings. Methods We will conduct a cross sectional study of the influence of national culture according to the five / six dimensions of Hofstede (1980; 2001) on both TEA and EEA for the 54 countries that participated in GEM 2011. Since it is well established that the opportunities for entrepreneurship vary substantially with a country’s level of economic development, we intend to conduct separate analyses for the three categories of development – innovation driven economies, efficient driven economies and factor driven economies. We also intend to restrict our assessment of TEA to opportunity driven entrepreneurship, as necessity driven entrepreneurship has a different relationship to the “entrepreneurial culture” that is the focus of our study. We will control for a range of factors such as GDP growth, ease of doing business index and unemployment. Results and Implications Descriptive analyses of the GEM TEA and EEA data reveal clusters of countries that appear to be have similar national culture. We are yet to conduct regression analyses.

Entrepreneurship and cities: evidence from the post-communist world

While attributing urban success to more abundant supply of entrepreneurship, more recent studies on entrepreneurship have shifted their focus to examining cross-city variation in entrepreneurial activity. Despite a growing number of spatial-oriented studies of entrepreneurship worldwide to our best knowledge no empirical evidence exists on the determinants of cross-city variation in entrepreneurship in the context of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) states. Estrin and Mickiewicz (2010) show that transition economies generally exhibit lower rates of entrepreneurship than observed in most developed and developing market economies. This difference is even more pronounced for the FSU compared to Central and Eastern Europe. This paper investigates variation in entrepreneurial activity across FSU cities, attempting to bridge the city-level gap in spatial-oriented empirical research.

The role of sustainability in community and regional development in Europe

Regions around the world are focusing on sustainability as an elemental and critical part of their economic survival. The aim of this paper is to examine how sustainability drives community and regional development in Europe. It begins by defining sustainability and the different contexts in which it has come to be understood. A case study methodology is then used to examine how cities like Cologne, Germany have fostered sustainability. Entrepreneurship and its role in community development are also addressed. It concludes with policy implications as well as the potential significant impact on businesses and communities in the United States.

Business Clusters in Eastern Europe: Policy Analysis and Cluster Performance

Clusters have increasingly become an essential part of policy discourses at all levels, EU, national, regional, dealing with regional development, competitiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, SMEs. These impressive efforts in promoting the concept of clusters on the policy-making arena have been accompanied by much less academic and scientific research work investigating the actual economic performance of firms in clusters, the design and execution of cluster policies and going beyond singular case studies to a more methodologically integrated and comparative approach to the study of clusters and their real-world impact. The theoretical background is far from being consolidated and there is a variety of methodologies and approaches for studying and interpreting this phenomenon while at the same time little comparability among studies on actual cluster performances. The conceptual framework of clustering suggests that they affect performance but theory makes little prediction as to the ultimate distribution of the value being created by clusters. This thesis takes the case of Eastern European countries for two reasons. One is that clusters, as coopetitive environments, are a new phenomenon as the previous centrally-based system did not allow for such types of firm organizations. The other is that, as new EU member states, they have been subject to the increased popularization of the cluster policy approach by the European Commission, especially in the framework of the National Reform Programmes related to the Lisbon objectives. The originality of the work lays in the fact that starting from an overview of theoretical contributions on clustering, it offers a comparative empirical study of clusters in transition countries. There have been very few examples in the literature that attempt to examine cluster performance in a comparative cross-country perspective. It adds to this an analysis of cluster policies and their implementation or lack of such as a way to analyse the way the cluster concept has been introduced to transition economies. Our findings show that the implementation of cluster policies does vary across countries with some countries which have embraced it more than others. The specific modes of implementation, however, are very similar, based mostly on soft measures such as funding for cluster initiatives, usually directed towards the creation of cluster management structures or cluster facilitators. They are essentially founded on a common assumption that the added values of clusters is in the creation of linkages among firms, human capital, skills and knowledge at the local level, most often perceived as the regional level. Often times geographical proximity is not a necessary element in the application process and cluster application are very similar to network membership. Cluster mapping is rarely a factor in the selection of cluster initiatives for funding and the relative question about critical mass and expected outcomes is not considered. In fact, monitoring and evaluation are not elements of the cluster policy cycle which have received a lot of attention. Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are the countries which have implemented cluster policies most decisively, Hungary and Poland have made significant efforts, while Slovakia and Romania have only sporadically and not systematically used cluster initiatives. When examining whether, in fact, firms located within regional clusters perform better and are more efficient than similar firms outside clusters, we do find positive results across countries and across sectors. The only country with negative impact from being located in a cluster is the Czech Republic.

Quantifying entrepreneurship and its impact on local economic performance: A spatial assessment in rural Switzerland

Regional and rural development policies in Europe increasingly emphasize entrepreneurship to mobilize the endogenous economic potential of rural territories. This study develops a concept to quantify entrepreneurship as place-dependent local potential to examine its impact on the local economic performance of rural territories in Switzerland. The short-to-medium-term impact of entrepreneurship on the economic performance of 1706 rural municipalities in Switzerland is assessed by applying three spatial random effects models. Results suggest a generally positive relationship between entrepreneurship and local development: rural municipalities with higher entrepreneurial potential generally show higher business tax revenues per capita and a lower share of social welfare cases among the population, although the impact on local employment is less clear. The explanatory power of entrepreneurship in all three models, however, was only moderate. This finding suggests that political expectations of fostering entrepreneurship to boost endogenous rural development in the short-to-medium term should be damped.

Spotlight-Europe - March 2015: The EU neighbourhood in shambles. Some recommendations for a new European neighbourhood strategy

Executive Summary. An “arc of instability” stretching from the European Union’s (EU) eastern borders down to the Mediterranean basin has undermined its flagship European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). This policy was designed to deliver prosperity, stability and democracy to countries surrounding the EU. It has manifestly failed and needs to be radically rethought. Starting with a tabula rasa, the EU should abandon the very concept of a heterogeneous “neighbourhood” in the face of glaring differences among the 16 countries affected, not least because some are uninterested in reform; others may even be failed states. EU member states are themselves pursuing divergent interests and goals. A fundamental review of the ENP should lead to more differentiated, targeted measures to promote “transformational change” within neighbouring states ready to accept it. The EU should offer revised incentives such as participation within the proposed “energy union” or freer trade designed to aid local economic development. It should embrace a wider range of actors, including civil society, promote entrepreneurship and help reform countries’ police and military forces. The review should reassert common EU institutions in negotiating and working with neighbours and give them a central role in preventing and resolving conflicts as well as promoting democratic reform and economic stability. This revised ENP should help underpin the EU’s efforts to forge a genuine Common Foreign and Security Policy.

Portfolio Entrepreneurship in Family Firms: A Resource-based Perspective

The phenomenon of portfolio entrepreneurship has attracted considerable scholarly attention and is particularly relevant in the family fi rm context. However, there is a lack of knowledge of the process through which portfolio entrepreneurship develops in family firms. We address this gap by analyzing four in-depth, longitudinal family firm case studies from Europe and Latin America. Using a resource-based perspective, we identify six distinct resource categories that are relevant to the portfolio entrepreneurship process. Furthermore, we reveal that their importance varies across time. Our resulting resource-based process model of portfolio entrepreneurship in family firms makes valuable contributions to both theory and practice.

Empirical analysis of human capital development and economic growth in Europe

Recent discussion of the knowledge-based economy draws increasingly attention to the role that the creation and management of knowledge plays in economic development. Development of human capital, the principal mechanism for knowledge creation and management, becomes a central issue for policy-makers and practitioners at the regional, as well as national, level. Facing competition both within and across nations, regional policy-makers view human capital development as a key to strengthening the positions of their economies in the global market. Against this background, the aim of this study is to go some way towards answering the question of whether, and how, investment in education and vocational training at regional level provides these territorial units with comparative advantages. The study reviews literature in economics and economic geography on economic growth (Chapter 2). In growth model literature, human capital has gained increased recognition as a key production factor along with physical capital and labour. Although leaving technical progress as an exogenous factor, neoclassical Solow-Swan models have improved their estimates through the inclusion of human capital. In contrast, endogenous growth models place investment in research at centre stage in accounting for technical progress. As a result, they often focus upon research workers, who embody high-order human capital, as a key variable in their framework. An issue of discussion is how human capital facilitates economic growth: is it the level of its stock or its accumulation that influences the rate of growth? In addition, these economic models are criticised in economic geography literature for their failure to consider spatial aspects of economic development, and particularly for their lack of attention to tacit knowledge and urban environments that facilitate the exchange of such knowledge. Our empirical analysis of European regions (Chapter 3) shows that investment by individuals in human capital formation has distinct patterns. Those regions with a higher level of investment in tertiary education tend to have a larger concentration of information and communication technology (ICT) sectors (including provision of ICT services and manufacture of ICT devices and equipment) and research functions. Not surprisingly, regions with major metropolitan areas where higher education institutions are located show a high enrolment rate for tertiary education, suggesting a possible link to the demand from high-order corporate functions located there. Furthermore, the rate of human capital development (at the level of vocational type of upper secondary education) appears to have significant association with the level of entrepreneurship in emerging industries such as ICT-related services and ICT manufacturing, whereas such association is not found with traditional manufacturing industries. In general, a high level of investment by individuals in tertiary education is found in those regions that accommodate high-tech industries and high-order corporate functions such as research and development (R&D). These functions are supported through the urban infrastructure and public science base, facilitating exchange of tacit knowledge. They also enjoy a low unemployment rate. However, the existing stock of human and physical capital in those regions with a high level of urban infrastructure does not lead to a high rate of economic growth. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that the rate of economic growth is determined by the accumulation of human and physical capital, not by level of their existing stocks. We found no significant effects of scale that would favour those regions with a larger stock of human capital. The primary policy implication of our study is that, in order to facilitate economic growth, education and training need to supply human capital at a faster pace than simply replenishing it as it disappears from the labour market. Given the significant impact of high-order human capital (such as business R&D staff in our case study) as well as the increasingly fast pace of technological change that makes human capital obsolete, a concerted effort needs to be made to facilitate its continuous development.

SMEs in a globalised world:survival and growth strategies on Europe's geographical periphery

This insightful book shows how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from some of the traditionally less dynamic peripheral economies of the 'old' EU - namely Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain - have responded to the twin challenges of globalisation and industrial restructuring. Through a series of unique case studies the contributing authors discuss how these economies, and in particular the SME sector, can be transformed. The book begins by examining the key drivers of the globally competitive SME sector in the EU, before moving on to explore the relationship between multinational enterprises (MNEs), SMEs and industrial development. The authors investigate important policy implications and provide lessons for SME development and growth. With empirical and theoretical contributions on SMEs in both the manufacturing and the services sectors, this essential book will be invaluable for researchers and policymakers in small business economics and management. Postgraduate students of entrepreneurship, business economics, industrial economics and European studies will appreciate this unique set of insights.