Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between an entrepreneur’s experience and education and his/her reliance on alternative sources of knowledge for exploring new business opportunities. The extant literature that is at the crossroads between sources of knowledge and the experiential and intellectual base of an entrepreneur (i.e., dimensions of his/her human capital) suggests that it is through experience and through education that an entrepreneur obtains knowledge. Using information on a sample of high-tech manufacturing firms across ten European countries, we explore heterogeneities in the influence of experience, age, and education of the firm’s primary founder on the perceived importance of (i.e., use of) alternative sources of knowledge. We find that the association of these characteristics differs significantly across sources of knowledge, and across European regions. Education is positively related to the importance of knowledge from research institutes and internal know-how, while age is negatively related to the importance of research institutes and positively related to publications and conferences. On the one hand, in South/East European countries, the importance of internal know-how is positively associated with age and education, but negatively associated with experience. On the other hand, the characteristics of primary founders of North/West European firms are more linked to the importance of the participation to funded research programmes. This source of knowledge is related positively with age and education and negatively with experience.
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Notes
We also use the acronym KIE to refer to knowledge intensive entrepreneurship.
For an excellent discussion of the importance of knowledge spillovers and building key relationship with suppliers as well as drawing on their market knowledge, see Audretsch and Lehmann (2016).
Vivas and Barge-Gil (2015) do identify numerous studies that examine the impact of alternative sources of knowledge on firm performance, whereas we do not.
The high-tech manufacturing sector is defined to include the following: aerospace, computers and office machinery, radio-television and communication equipment, manufacture of medical, precision and optical instruments (scientific instruments), pharmaceuticals, manufacture of electrical machinery and apparatus, manufacture of machinery and equipment, and the chemical industry.
In Greek mythology the word Aegis refers to the powerful shield carried by Athena and Zeus.
The architects of the AEGIS database realized that firms in smaller countries would need to be over sampled. To account for non-random sampling across countries, sampling weights are used in the econometric analysis below. See Caloghirou et al. (2011) and Link and Swann (2016) on this issue. However, we relied on unweighted data for the construction of the descriptive tables below in an effort to facilitate replication of our results by others who might use the AEGIS database.
Each category takes the value of 1 if at least one of the sub-categories is equal to 1. For example, if at least one of the sources among clients and suppliers take value 1, then the source of knowledge vertical is equal to 1.
The AEGIS survey asks for the experience (and education) of up to four founders. We are assuming that the first listed founded is the primary founder, and we used his/her experience (and education) for this analysis. Our findings are unchanged if we used the average experience (and education) of all founders. These results are available from the authors on request.
This finding may reflect proximity to clients, customers, and suppliers, but we do not have such data.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the AEGIS consortium for providing data of the AEGIS survey which supported the empirical investigation of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in Europe in different sectoral, country and socioeconomic contexts. This survey was conducted in the context of the AEGIS research project (Advancing Knowledge-Intensive Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Economic Growth and Social Well-being in Europe) co-funded by the European Commission under Theme 8 “Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities” of the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.
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Amoroso, S., Audretsch, D.B. & Link, A.N. Sources of knowledge used by entrepreneurial firms in the European high-tech sector. Eurasian Bus Rev 8, 55–70 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40821-017-0078-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40821-017-0078-4