How Does Terrorism Change the Business Landscape for Firms?

This chapter introduces a new framework for understanding firm creation and firm behavior in the face of terrorism and its ensuing risks such as institutional disruption. There is surprisingly scant theoretical or empirical research on how terrorism impacts firms and their ability to be agile in the face of risk. The extant strategic management literature is underdeveloped for making such assessments because it largely ignores the socio-cognitive impact of collective traumas on society. Building on the traditional assumptions of institutional theory from strategic management, the authors incorporate cosmopolitan memory theory from the field of international relations to offer a theoretically grounded set of testable predictions about terrorism's effects on both new and existing firms.

Listening to the buzz: Exploring the link between firm creation and regional innovative atmosphere as reflected by social media

This paper presents a novel approach to capture ‘buzz’, the vibrancy and knowledge exchange propensity of localised informal communication flows. Building on a conceptual framework based on relational economic geography, we argue the content of buzz may allow to probe into the character of places and investigate what is ‘in the air’ within regional entrepreneurial milieux. In particular, we analyse big data to listen for the presence of buzz about innovation – defined by discursive practices that reflect an innovative atmosphere – and explore how this may influence regional firm creation. Using information from 180 million geolocated Tweets comprising almost two billion words across NUTS3 regions in the UK for the year 2014, our results offer novel evidence, robust to different model specifications, that regions characterised by a relatively higher intensity of discussion and vibrancy around topics related to innovation may provide a more effective set of informal resources for sharing and recombination of ideas, defining regional capabilities to support and facilitate entrepreneurial processes. The findings contribute to the literature on the intangible dimensions in the geography of innovation and offer new insights on the potential of natural language processing for economic geography research.

Does international patent collaboration have an effect on entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship is one of the main pillars of growth in any economy. Achieving a high rate of entrepreneurship in a region has become the priority objective of governments and firms. However, in many cases, new firm creation is conditioned by relations or collaboration in innovation with agents from other countries. Previous literature has analyzed the mechanisms that foster entrepreneurship. This paper attempts to shed light on the influence of international patent collaboration (IPC) on entrepreneurial activity at country level taking into account the timing of this relationship. An empirical study is proposed to verify whether IPC leads to greater entrepreneurship and to analyze the gestation period between international patenting actions and firm creation. Using the Generalized Method of Moments, the two hypotheses proposed were tested in a data panel of 30 countries for the period 2005–2017. Results show the influence of IPC in promoting entrepreneurship in the same year, but especially in the following year. The study offers implications for entrepreneurs and public agents. IPC affects the integration and interaction of international agents in a country, favors the production of new knowledge, and increases positive externalities in a territory. All this facilitates the creation of new companies with a high innovative component.

Academic Assets, Life-Cycle, and Entrepreneurship: A Longitudinal Study of Estonian Academic Workers

This study aimed to find out how academic assets are interconnected with firm creation by academic staff at different academic life-cycle stages. The applied theoretical setting integrated resource-based and life-cycle explanations of academic entrepreneurship. A longitudinal whole population dataset of Estonian academic workers was applied, with a dependent variable reflecting firm creation, and independent variables representing different academic assets. The logistic regression results indicated the varying importance of different academic assets at different academic career stages, while divergence also exists with respect to academic discipline. The results enable postulating several theoretical propositions, accompanied by practical implications for technology transfer at universities.