Volume 3, Issue 1 - Special Issue – Entrepreneurship as an European Experience, Guest Editor: Guido Corbetta, Executive Committee Member: Alessandro Minichilli

This Invited Editorial introduces the Entrepreneurship Research Journal Special Issue focused on discussing entrepreneurship in Europe as a complex, multilevel phenomenon. Building on the evidence offered by the four articles and related commentaries in this issue, we discuss entrepreneurial phenomena at different micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Our analysis suggests that the diffusion of entrepreneurial initiatives in Europe is an important challenge that should be high on the agenda of entrepreneurship scholars, with important implications for policy-makers. We conclude with some research questions for future studies at the European level, which may contribute to move the debate in the proposed direction.

In this paper, we provide a brief review of how entrepreneurship policies have evolved and what implied conceptions of “entrepreneurship” underlie attempts to measure the phenomenon. We propose that a major shortcoming in policy thinking is the insufficient recognition that entrepreneurship, at a country level, is a systemic phenomenon and should be approached as such. To address this gap, we propose the concept of National Systems of Entrepreneurship that recognizes the systemic character of country-level entrepreneurship, and also recognizes that, although embedded in a country-level context, entrepreneurial processes are fundamentally driven by individuals. We then explain how the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index methodology is designed to profile National Systems of Entrepreneurship. We apply the GEDI approach to examine the entrepreneurial performance of the European Union. According to the GEDI index, the EU countries reveal considerable differences in their entrepreneurial performance. Moreover, there are even larger differences over the 14 pillars of entrepreneurship. In addition to highlighting bottleneck factors, the index also provides rough indications on how much a country should seek to alleviate a given bottleneck. While there are numerous ways to improve entrepreneurship in the EU and its member states, we analyze only one simple situation. An important implication of the analysis is that uniform policy does not work, and the EU member states should apply different policy mixes to reach the same improvement in the GEDI points.

Recent researchers have noted differences in the culture of entrepreneurship research between the USA and Europe, with European researchers being more policy orientated, more methodologically open, more inclined to favour multidsciplinary approaches and less preoccupied with “grand theories”. The leading entrepreneurship journals are US based, and increasingly becoming dominated by theory-driven approaches to research. As the US journals are edited and reviewed by international academics, including many European ones, this apparent culture difference cannot be accounted by national culture alone. This paper discusses the notion that the drive for setting rigorous standards for achieving elite status for the journals mainly through championing rigorous theory development is driven by the needs for setting benchmarks for research selectivity in Universities in both sides of the Atlantic. This results in a disturbing mismatch between academic and applied research, as most of the funding comes from governments who need answers to important policies rather than academic questions. This is particularly a serious challenge for a majority of European researchers who depend largely on policy sources for funding.

Does family-influenced human capital (FIHC) facilitate or hamper resource acquisition Previous literature is scant and offers a negative portrayal of the family business context in this respect. We question this negative view of the phenomenon by arguing that FIHC may be beneficial to resource acquisition when family members are characterized by high bridging social capital. More specifically, we argue that family-influenced bridging social capital positively moderates the relationship between FIHC and resource acquisition, as bridging social capital reduces the disadvantages of FIHC allowing for the advantages to come to the fore. Our hypothesis is tested and confirmed on a data set of 241 family firms based in the Republic of Ireland.

This research focuses on exit choices within SMEs. In this study, “exit choice” refers to the decision to opt for either liquidation or sale of the firm. The predictions focus on human-capital and firm-resource variables. The hypotheses are tested on a set of 158 owners of small firms, the majority of which are micro-firms with 0–9 employees. The results of a series of binominal logistic regression analyses show that firm-resource characteristics (previous sales turnover, the firm’s independence from its owner, and firm size), together with one aspect of the owner’s specific human capital (the owner’s acquisition experience), predict exit choice. The conclusions have been made with caution, as the dataset is relatively small and the number of predictors is limited.

In the paper, the concept of absorptive capacity, already successfully applied to firms, is extended to territories. Territory’s Absorptive Capacity is here defined as the ability of a Region to identify, assimilate, and exploit external knowledge. From a theoretical point of view, the concept of Territory’s Absorptive Capacity integrates two fields of studies, those of innovation systems and regional science. Three propositions are developed starting from the consideration that territory’s absorptive capacity is dependent on increasing investments in human resource learning in a Region, promoting R&D activities and, above all, integrating knowledge flows through the action of territorial knowledge gatekeepers.

In this commentary, we review the most important theoretical and empirical contributions of the article “Resource Acquisition in Family Firms: the Role of Family Influenced Human and Social Capital”. We particularly focus our attention on two important contributions. First, this study goes beyond a dichotomous view of family-influenced human capital, which has been often characterized either as a positive or as a negative factor. Second, the study shows that the impact of family-influenced human capital is likely influenced by other contingency factors, like bridging social capital. We conclude the commentary with a list of research questionsl for future research.

Entrepreneurial exit is a fact all over the world and it not only affects the entrepreneur and the firm but also the industry and, in some cases, even the regional economy. Nevertheless, entrepreneurial exit has only recently received scholarly attention and, more specifically, still little we know on the different methods entrepreneurs use for exiting their ventures, on the factors that contribute to their choice of exit route, and on the antecedents of entrepreneurial exit choice and outcome. Even though it has received little research attention, previous exit research has assumed a multifaceted nature, because of the differences in levels/units of analysis, theoretical perspectives, contexts, and choice of dependent and independent variables accounted for in the present commentary.

Absorptive capacity has been widely studied in organizational contexts. Few studies, however, deal with broader contexts, despite the fact that some authors suggest that organizations may build inter-firm networks to keep knowledge until they need to absorb it internally. Especially relevant to the role of human capital and knowledge gatekeepers as mentioned in Schillaci, Romano and Nicotra’s article, this commentary build on these two propositions arguing the need for a more integrative framework to understand absorptive capacity in detracted regions, not forgetting the role of the environment.