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We study the implications of ownership and its induced incentives on firm survival on the stock market for young and high‐tech firms. Using a unique data set of all 341 firms listed on the Neuer Markt, the German equivalent of the NASDAQ, our results differ from studies on more traditional firms. Ownership by CEOs has no influence on firm survival when introducing measurements of human capital and intellectual property rights. This confirms assumptions that firms in the knowledge based industries differ in their governance structure from traditional firms.

In contrast to the predictions from the family business and the small- and medium-sized enterprise internationalization literatures, Hidden Champions are world-market leaders exhibiting a high share of exports. The purpose of this study is to analyze their strategy of internationalization of Hidden Champions in Germany and find that the international success and strong, sustained performance emanates from their product type, enabling to successfully pursue a niche strategy for differentiated premium products.

The authors first conceptually explore how Hidden Champions pursue strategic internationalization, and then analyze a sample of N = 2,690 Hidden Champions to examine why Germany has been able to generate the highest per capita share of Hidden Champions in the world.

The study finds that on both a micro and macro level, the strong and sustained performance of Hidden Champions is driven by product type and quality strategies. Niche strategies for a knowledge-intensive, technological product enable the firm to lock-in customers. However, to safeguard the internalization of highly specific quasi-rents, Hidden Champions enter foreign markets through fully owned subsidiaries, retaining control and residual property rights. The second finding of this paper is that Germany has succeeded in deploying its high level of human capital into the Mittelstand through highly skilled workers.

Unfortunately, no micro-level panel data are available. Still macro-level data beginning in the nineteenth century provide strong empirical support for the hypothesized causality.

This is the first paper to link the strong and sustained export performance of Germany to the Hidden Champions by examining the origins of the German Mittelstand model, dating back to the social, political and economic developments of nineteenth century.

The purpose of this paper is to study the development of the biotechnology industry at the industry and firm level when the financing environment becomes hostile and assess the reasons for this development.

An organizational evolution perspective to analyze the case of the German biotech sector was applied and its response to the hostile financing environment in the years 2002‐2004, which followed the burst of the high‐tech bubble at the stock markets. Population ecology and data from biotech reports to investigate the pattern of external adaptation processes at the industry level were used. The evolutionary economics perspective, multiple case studies of bioventures, and biotech reports to study internal adaptation processes at the firm level was employed.

The assumption of both external and internal adaptation processes was found in parallel is necessary to explain the evolution of the biotech industry in a hostile financing environment. Although external adaptation takes place to some extent through insolvencies and a reduced rate of new firm foundations, many bioventures adapt internally by downsizing, changing their business models, and entering into strategic alliances and M&As. This results in surprisingly weak consolidation at the industry level.

This paper provides an explanation why the consolidation of the German biotech industry in 2002‐2004 was much weaker than expected by experts. Moreover, the paper shows that application of population ecology and evolutionary economics in parallel well describes industry evolution and organizational change. Finally, the paper demonstrates how bioventures can adapt their financing strategies to hostile environments.

As the main factor for sustainable development of countries, entrepreneurship is a difficult path only chosen by those who have a high level of risk-taking. On this path, entrepreneurship requires an ecosystem that welcomes this type of thinking and eliminates the barriers on the path as much as possible. This ecosystem comprises various components that attempt to pave the way in a private and public manner. The entrepreneurial ecosystem still has many latent aspects after several years. This study aims to provide a big picture of all studies published in the Web of Science database to help future researchers.

In this research, 765 scientific papers published in the database were analyzed using 3 main approaches of network analysis, co-occurrence analysis of keywords and co-citation clustering.

In the end, four major clusters were identified for articles in this field in the clustering section, including the entrepreneurial ecosystem, academic entrepreneurship, innovation ecosystem and institutional entrepreneurship.

This paper used a new approach for reviewing the entrepreneurial ecosystem and made a big picture of all previous research studies. In the end, an unsupervised machine learning approach was used to clustering the research studies and four major clusters were identified.

This article focuses on university education in innovation. We examine and present a novel system we have developed that is achieving our vision of instantiating a robust education that teaches, develops, and grades innovation in the education system. This paper is discussing a paradigm shift, offering new degrees with a common core focused on innovation, with teams of students learning and practicing the key elements of the innovation process. First we examine the motivation and need for a radically new approach, not a new major or a course, that is based upon a new common core and family of degrees. We describe how we knew that to effectively reach our goals the program had to span across departments, college boundaries, and beyond the very core of the university. Second, we show how in doing so we created a family of degrees that moved us beyond the centuries-old B.S. and B.A. educational constraints with a new, innovative "Bachelor of Innovation^™" (B.I.) family of degrees that includes a core built around multi-disciplinary multi-year innovation partnering with real companies. Lastly we summarize the unique aspects of the program and the rationale behind them, from the 3-year multi-disciplinary team experience to the trademarked name. We present our B.I. program as its own case study in innovation within higher education, reviewing the key challenges we faced so that other innovative institutions and departments may learn from our experience. We conclude with lessons learned and the future of the B.I. family of degrees.

Among nascent entrepreneurial ventures, are some types of bootstrapping techniques more successful than others? We compare externally oriented and internally oriented techniques with respect to the likelihood of becoming an operational venture; and we compare cash-increasing and cost-decreasing techniques with respect to becoming operational. Using data from the first Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, we find evidence suggesting that when bootstrapping a new venture, the percentage of cash-increasing and cost-decreasing externally oriented bootstrapping techniques that a ventureʼs owners use are positive predictors of subsequent positive cash flow (one and two years later). But, internally oriented techniques are not related to subsequent cash flow.

The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding of how different aspects of the national institutional environment may influence the extent of innovative entrepreneurial activities across countries. Several institutional and conductive factors affecting a country’s capacity to support innovative entrepreneurship are explored.

Institutional theory is used to examine the national regulatory, normative, cognitive and conducive aspects that measure a country’s ability to support innovative entrepreneurship. A cross-national institutional profile is constructed to validate an entrepreneurial innovation model. The impacts of country-level national institutions on innovative entrepreneurial activity as measured by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data are assessed through structural equation modeling.

Knowledge about the influence of specific institutional aspects on innovative entrepreneurship, and hence of institutional structures within and across countries, is enhanced. For new innovative enterprises, conductive and regulatory aspects seem to matter most. All conductive factors have a significant and positive impact on entrepreneurial activity rates.

Results could support policy makers and practitioners in evaluating government policies’ effects on innovative entrepreneurship. Interventions should target both individual attributes and context. Future research could include longitudinal designs to measure the direction of causality.

Aspects such as regulatory institutions, and conductive factors such as information communication technology use and technology adoption, are important for innovation entrepreneurship development.

The literature on institutional theory and innovative entrepreneurship is highly limited. This study complements growing interest in empirical analysis of the effects of national institutions on innovative entrepreneurial activities and substantiates previous empirical work.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.