Green start-ups and local knowledge spillovers from clean and dirty technologies

Alessandra Colombelli and Francesco Quatraro

Small Business Economics, 2019, vol. 52, issue 4, No 2, 773-792

Abstract: Abstract There is wide consensus about the importance of green technologies in achieving superior economic and environmental performances. However, the literature on their determinants has neglected the creation of green start-ups as a way of introducing green technologies onto the market. Drawing upon the knowledge spillovers theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE) and on previous literature on the complex and systemic nature of green technologies, we have tested the relevance of local knowledge stocks, distinguishing between clean and dirty stocks, in the creation of green start-ups. Moreover, the effects of the technological composition of local stocks have been investigated, by focusing on both related and unrelated technological variety, as well as on coherence. Consistently with the recent literature, green start-ups are associated with higher levels of variety, thus pointing to the relevance of diverse and heterogeneous knowledge sources, although in related and complementary technological fields.

Keywords: Green start-ups; New firm formation; Energy-related technologies; Knowledge-spillovers theory of entrepreneurship; L26; M13; R11; O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-017-9934-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:52:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s11187-017-9934-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-017-9934-y

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().