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The purpose of this paper is to analyse technology‐based entrepreneurship and its importance for economic growth. Firstly, it discusses the concept of technology‐based entrepreneurship, and, secondly, it moves on to question if the phenomenon is important for regional growth. New technology‐based firms (NTBFs) can influence economic growth both directly, by their own growth, and indirectly, for example, by providing specialised input to other firms. Quite frequently those indirect effects are established within a regional context.

This paper contributes knowledge about the relatively successful Swedish case. Based on several of the author's earlier studies, some empirical data are used to illustrate some characteristics of the Swedish case. The background and origin of Swedish NTBFs, as well as the growth of these firms, are discussed. Since, technology‐based entrepreneurship is a strongly regional phenomena special attention will be paid to one of Sweden's major regions; the Gothenburg region.

The paper shows that the number of technology‐based new firms corresponds to a small share of general entrepreneurship. Technology‐based entrepreneurship is a highly regional phenomenon, where local large firms are important for the training and breeding of future entrepreneurs. Spin‐off processes are likely to enhance regional knowledge development and learning processes because it involves the diffusion and sharing of technological and managerial expertise within the region.

The results suggests that a country like Sweden, with high R&D spendings and innovative activities, should be encouraged to increase its entrepreneurial activities in order to benefit even further from its R&D and technology development.

Is of value by adding to the knowledge on technology‐intensive firms – how they tend to grow, how frequent they are and their role in economic growth.

This study examines the social and human capital of successful Arab and Jewish technological entrepreneurs in Israel, and explores how human and social capital differ between technology-based industries.

A quantitative study was conducted using a sample of 1,184 technology-based ventures from two technology-based industries—life science (LS) and information technology (IT)—that were founded by Jewish and Arab entrepreneurs.

The results show that in the LS industry, successful Arab entrepreneurs possess higher human and social capital compared with Jewish entrepreneurs. However, in the IT industry, the Jewish entrepreneurs possess higher human and social capital. These findings reflect the deeper entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities regarding ethnic entrepreneurs' ability to break through technology-based industries. Future research directions are provided.

This study makes two contributions to the theoretical understanding of ethnic entrepreneurship and technology-based ventures. First, this study focuses on the impact of human and social capital on economic growth in the context of technological entrepreneurship in technology-based industries, since the ethnic entrepreneurship literature has mainly focused on traditional industries. Second, this study examines the effect of the founders' ethnicity, and explores how human and social capital factors vary across industries due to their specific contextual characteristics.

The purpose of this paper was to ascertain how social entrepreneurs were required to recognize their new ventures’ scope and scale of operations. The firm boundary was based upon two dimensions, namely, the scope of the offering and its scale. The objective of this research was to ascertain the thinking regarding this of social entrepreneurs engaged through technology-based social entrepreneurship (TBSE).

This study conducted an in-depth interview of 26 technology entrepreneurs engaged in social entrepreneurship ventures in India. The interview was carried out based upon a semi-structured open-ended questionnaire. This study undertook thematic and relational content analysis to develop a model of technology-based social entrepreneurs’ venture scoping and scaling.

This study found that the antecedent variables were the level of support perceived by social entrepreneur from government and at the industry level. Furthermore, the variables’ entrepreneurial and market orientation of social entrepreneurs were found to be the independent variables. These four variables in turn determined the explorative and exploitative horizon of the technology-based social entrepreneurs. Finally, an interplay of these variables ascertained the perspectives of social entrepreneurs engaged in TBSE regarding the notion of their firm’s scope and scale.

The theoretical insights developed in this research study provided an integrated theoretical perspective accommodating both environmental perspectives (industry support and government support) and organizational perspectives (entrepreneurial and market aspects). This was in context of TBSE.

The insights from this research study could provide a robust and comprehensive understanding to social entrepreneurs regarding the strategic thinking towards scale and scope for a technology-based social venture.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study was one of the first theoretical works in TBSE towards scaling versus scoping perspectives.

Discusses case study and interview evidence to examine the evolution and development of entrepreneurial strategies in the high technology small firm (HTSF). Evidence from case study material suggests that a period of non high technology development can be an advantage for the entrepreneur to gain essential contacts, networks and learn to develop strategy, as well as time to acquire income and funding to permit the development of the technology‐based firm. The paper discusses evidence from four rich case studies. Each of these involved a non‐high tech start‐up, yet this was still crucial to the entrepreneurship process and learning of the entrepreneur. Material from case evidence is also combined with interview evidence to discuss the critical factors in the learning process and the development of entrepreneurial strategies from a programme of interviews with HTSFs. It is argued that the evolution of a marketing strategy is part of the learning process involved in entrepreneurial development, we need to understand the diversity of this process if intervention is to be better informed by practitioners and by policy makers. In this paper we stress the diversity of entrepreneurial development, within HTSFs, discuss the importance of learning in entrepreneurial development for developing marketing strategies and develop policy implications for intervention.

This chapter aims to analyze the participation of entrepreneurship studies from the perspective of capabilities and technology-based startups in Latin America, which implies considering capabilities from a perspective of innovation, technology, knowledge, and learning. The chapter conducts a bibliometric review from which the characteristics of the Latin American presence in the analysis of startups and related issues are identified. The analysis shows that Latin America has had a small but growing presence at the world level, as is the case with the treatment of the startups in the international arena, and where the topics of innovation and capabilities have been little addressed. A scheme is proposed based on which entrepreneurial capabilities are considered as a way of understanding the creation and trajectory of startup companies. In the trajectory of the startup companies, these capabilities unfold and grow through processes of integration of complementary resources and learning processes, which result in the construction of new capabilities that feed the further growth of the company.

COVID-19 has affected most business activities, including technology-based business. The higher the business vulnerability rating, the greater the impacts. After identifying three dimensions of vulnerability (exposure, business sensitivity and response capacity), this study aims to determine the potential components and indicators of the vulnerability of technology-based businesses.

Using the indicator approach, a comprehensive vulnerability model was developed for assessing the vulnerability of the technology-based business against COVID-19.

In this study, COVID-19, as a biological threat and an exogenous shock, was considered the exposure dimension. Business characteristics, job characteristics, business owner-manager demographics, product and supplier characteristics were identified as the sensitivity dimension, while resources, human capital, technological capitals, social capitals, institutional capitals, infrastructures, management capacity and supply chain capabilities were defined as the adaptive business capability or response capacity. To determine vulnerability and response capacity against exogenous shocks and a pandemic crisis, the framework can act as a useful checklist for managers and owners of technology-based businesses.

Research on the COVID-19, especially in the technology-based business, is still at the emergent stage. This study is a pioneering effort to review the literature on business vulnerability and provide a framework to reduce business vulnerability using the indicator-based approach.

As technological entrepreneurship has distinctive characteristics and needs particular conceptualizations, it is also important to have specific theoretical developments about its technological entrepreneurship. Studying the related domains like entrepreneurship and technology can be helpful in this path; however, their differences should be considered as well. The purpose of this study is to design a model in support of technological entrepreneurship. Since financing is considered as the main restriction on creating and developing technological entrepreneurship, the focus of this study is the research of financial policies of technological entrepreneurship..

This research is from the qualitative point of view and in terms of the purpose of application-development that has been done in the second part. At the first step, Iran’s (IRI) national comprehensive policies have been studied from 1993 to 2020; out of 52 documents, 7 were relevant, of which 38 policies were eventually selected. Then, policy statements were explored, and open coding and categorization has been done through theme analysis approach to attain fundamental themes and organizational themes. In the second step, the themes were extracted in the form of soft research method with the approach of interpretive structural modeling to level the financing policies of technological entrepreneurship in Iran.

The results show that the most important factors influencing financing and entrepreneurship in Iran are increasing the productivity of goods and services, supporting entrepreneurship, increasing the efficiency of monetary policies that are in the first level.

Research limitations include access to upstream documents, strategies, administrative and organizational coordination to study documents.

These findings are very important to scholars, the policymakers and technological entrepreneurship operators in designing their financing strategies. The results show that the most important factors influencing financing and entrepreneurship in Iran are increasing the productivity of goods and services, supporting entrepreneurship, increasing the efficiency of monetary policies.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to explore the explanation and classification of technology-based entrepreneurship financing policies in Iran. Moreover, the findings of this study would prove useful in detailed studies of financing policies in the Middle Eastern countries as well.

The chapters in this volume have been derived from the best papers presented at the annual International High Technology Small Firms (HTSFs) Conference held at Enschede, The Netherlands, and organized by Nikos, the Dutch Institute for Knowledge Intensive Entrepreneurship in May 2008, with the collaboration of Manchester Business School. The present volume is the ninth in the present series of “new millennium” volumes from this conference and book series that began in 1993. As Oakey and Cook wrote in the introduction to Volume 8, government policies in developed Western economies remain focused on emphasizing innovation driven by entrepreneurship as a major vehicle for future economic success. In particular, many European governments support such entrepreneurship by emphasizing the key role of new firm “gazelles” in producing the disruptive innovations and inventions that will create future new industries. This approach in the Netherlands has led to the creation of special Chairs of International entrepreneurship at three technical universities, namely, The University of Twente, the Technical University of Delft, and the Technical University of Eindhoven. These chairs have now been filled and are held at the University of Twente by Shaker Zahra, the Technical University of Delft by Paul Trott, and the Technical University of Eindhoven by Anthony di Bennedetto. The objective of these appointments is the stimulation of technology-based entrepreneurship in the student populations of the Netherlands university sector, and to increase our detailed knowledge of technology-based enterprises, involving a strong focus on the research problems of internationalization, particularly among, university-derived HTSFs.

Technological entrepreneurship concerns the transformation of potentially viable technological opportunities into successful businesses. Absorptive capacity is argued to be essential for this transformation, since it can facilitate the prediction of new technology trends and the assimilation and application of new knowledge to produce new commercial outputs. The investigation of the relationships between absorptive capacity, technological entrepreneurship and their impact on Guangdong technology firms' performance is the purpose of this study.

In this aim a positive causal chain from absorptive capacity to technological entrepreneurship and from this latter to performance is tested through a mediation analysis, which uses an ordinary least squares regression‐based path analytical framework for estimating indirect effects on a sample of 113 Guangdong technology‐based firms.

Findings are consistent with the hypothesis that greater absorptive capacity leads to greater technological entrepreneurship, which in turn leads to greater performance. Therefore evidence is provided about both the mediating role of technological entrepreneurship and the role of absorptive capacity as its antecedent in relation to Guangdong‐based technology firms' performance.

A relevant but somewhat neglected relationship is examined using an integrative model in the Guangdong context. Moreover the study uses direct measures of absorptive capacity as a capability and provides a firm‐level operationalization of technological entrepreneurship. In so doing it also adopts state‐of‐the‐art analysis techniques and highlights the relevance of investments in soft factors for Guangdong technology firms' path towards excellence.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the mediating role of entrepreneurial alertness in the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial orientation (EO).

This is a quantitative study using a self-report survey for information gathering. The hypotheses are tested with a sample of 112 entrepreneurs from technology-based firms in Mexico using hierarchical regression analysis. The study follows procedural and statistical recommendations from previous studies in order to strengthen the results.

The results demonstrate a significant and positive relationship between entrepreneurial passion and EO, and this relationship is mediated for each dimension of entrepreneurial alertness.

Although there are interesting results in the study, some limitations should be recognized. First, it is important to consider the stage in which the firm is operating because it influences the firm’s behavior. Second, the generalization of the results should be validated in non-technology-based firms that operate in different contexts and conditions. The study’s findings have implications for small business support programs and entrepreneurs.

The study contributes to the emerging research of entrepreneurial passion in the field of entrepreneurship and to the scarce empirical research on entrepreneurial alertness. Both constructs are related to one of the most representative topics in the field, as is EO.