What turns knowledge into innovative products? The role of entrepreneurship and knowledge spillovers

By J. Block, Roy Thurik, Haibo Zhou. Journal of evolutionary economics, 2009

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship seeks to explain the fundamentals and consequences of entrepreneurship with respect to economic performance. This paper uses the knowledge spillover theory to explain different innovation outcomes. We hypothesize that a high rate of entrepreneurship facilitates the process of turning knowledge into new-to-the-market innovation but has no effect on the relationship between knowledge and new-to-the-firm innovation. Our results using European country-level and pooled OLS, fixed- and random-effects regressions show that a high rate of entrepreneurship increases the chances that knowledge will become new-to-the-market innovation. The findings highlight the importance of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship in the process of the commercialization of knowledge. We discuss the implications for entrepreneurship and innovation policy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffe07e72e26139b61341321f1b5ab47e13951794

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Citations in the corpus

A portfolio perspective on entrepreneurship and economic development (2015, unknown): “Block et al. (2013) link the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to innovation economics and analyze the effect of entrepreneurship on the transformation of knowledge into innovation.”
Academics’ start-up intentions and knowledge filters: an individual perspective of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (2013, background): “2007) and which is the source of entrepreneurial opportunities (Mueller 2006; Qian and Acs 2013); (2) the mechanism to appropriate the economic value of those opportunities through entrepreneurial actions where the entrepreneur is considered the missing link in converting knowledge into economically”
The Schumpeterian entrepreneur: a review of the empirical evidence on the antecedents, behaviour and consequences of innovative entrepreneurship (2017, unknown): “This process is initiated by entrepreneurs who turn new ideas into marketable products and services (Acs et al. 2009; Henderson and Weiler 2009; Block, Thurik, and Zhou 2013).”
The value of an educated population for an individual's entrepreneurship success (2014, unknown): “Entrepreneurship may very well be one of the main channels through which new economic knowledge can be commercialized (Parker, 2009, p. 74; Block et al., 2009, Braunerhjelm et al., 2010).”
The emergence of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (2014, unknown): “Recent contributions, like Block et al. (2013) link”
The Prevalence and Determinants of Social Entrepreneurship at the Macro Level (2016, methodology): “Therefore, in an effort to also avoid the danger of multicollinearity, we correct these independent variables for per capita income (Block, Thurik, and Zhou 2012).11 For rule of law, this correction involves performing a linear regression Ti5T ðGDPiÞ1ui where Ti is the strength of the rule of law…”
Total factor productivity and the role of entrepreneurship (2016, background): “This implies that entrepreneurship is an important transfer mechanism to facilitate the process of knowledge spillovers (Mueller, 2006; Audretsch et al., 2009; Acs at el., 2009; Block et al., 2013).”
The rise of the entrepreneurial economy and the future of dynamic capitalism (2013, background): “Block et al. (2013) show that a high rate of entrepreneurship facilitates the process of turning knowledge into new-to-the-market innovation but has no effect on the relationship between knowledge and new-to-the-firm innovation.”