What Turns Knowledge into Innovative Products? The Role of Entrepreneurship and Knowledge Spillovers

Joern Block, Roy Thurik and Haibo Zhou

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: commercialization of knowledge; community innovation survey; economic growth; entrepreneurship; innovation; knowledge; knowledge spillovers; patents; technology policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M M13 O10 O30 O31 O32 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09-15
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/16769/ERS-2009-049-ORG.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What turns knowledge into innovative products? The role of entrepreneurship and knowledge spillovers (2013)
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:ems:eureri:16769

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).