Entrepreneurial culture and innovation in the services sector: case study evidence from Greece

Anastasia Petrou and Irene Daskalopoulou

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Innovation in the services sectors has been a rather neglected research area under the commonly held view that manufacturing firms are the main drivers of innovation in developed economies. The rise of the service economy has redirected the research agenda towards the potential of services firms to adopt innovation activity. Here we analyze the determinants of innovation activity in the tourism industry, which is one of the fastest growing service industries in the world. Our analysis builds upon the theoretical notion of entrepreneurial culture in order to suggest that entrepreneurs possess such culture when they actively and consciously seek information in order to underwrite the risk and ambiguity inherent in actions such as innovation activity. At the empirical level, entrepreneurial culture is approximated by active engagement in networking activity. Our results indicate that both internal and external to the firm social capital generation processes, determine innovation activity in tourism and provide evidence over the selective nature of information networks.

Keywords: social capital; innovation; firm behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 L21 O12 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/22666/1/MPRA_paper_22666.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:22666

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().