ABSTRACT
Moreover, the literature on market for technologies emphasizes the importance of IPRs in order to found a new innovative firm. In highly dynamic technological contexts, firms frequently are created around a patent or a set of patents that thus represent critical assets for the new ventures. In fact, when IPRs are strong and well enforced, it is possible that new firms enter the market by specializing in the development and sale of specific technologies. This strategy ultimately allows avoiding the costs and risks of large-scale investments necessary to move to the production and marketing phase (Arora and Merges 2004; Gans et al. 2002). Moreover, patents may provide a further source of assessment and an overview on the technological competences and economic value that might favour the establishment of partnerships and the access to external funding (Giuri et al. 2007). Furthermore, empirical evidence indicates the increasing necessity of individual firms to engage in formal and informal agreements with other actors (i.e. networks) in order to collect and eventually share the relevant resources to production and innovation activities (Burt 1993). Specifically in knowledge-based sectors, these networks are growing in terms of number of actors involved and of resources exchanged, thus generating more and more complex structures and new configuration forms. Indeed, the increasing complexity of knowledge-intensive sectors (and their relative knowledge base) implies an increasing dispersion and distribution of resources, knowledge and competencies among different actors. Thus, it is more and more important to set up agreements in order to collect and exchange resources and, ultimately, to coordinate the innovative activities and produce more and more sophisticated and knowledge-and technology-intensive products and services (Powell and Grodal 2005). Finally, the highly systemic nature of innovation and technology and the different and distributed nature of the resources that entrepreneurs need to gather to launch a new venture, suggest that a systemic view can be very fruitfully adapted and exploited to study entrepreneurship phenomena and their relation to innovation. In this chapter in particular, we retain two systemic perspectives. First, a sectoral system perspective. The empirical observation actually indicates that the rate and type of innovation and the organization of innovative activities (Malerba 2002) and the number of firms entering a new technical field (Breschi et al. 2000) greatly differ across sectors. Accordingly, also entrepreneurial ventures carrying out innovative activities might considerably differ across sectors in terms of the differential endowments, the key characteristics, resources and linkages they are able to activate and exploit in the early stages. Second, a national system perspective. The empirical observation indicates that the rate and type of innovation and the organization of innovative activities greatly differ also across countries as well as entrepreneurial activities, which are a crucial function of national innovation systems (Nelson 1993). All these streams of literature inspired our analysis and allowed us to identify the main dimensions explored in the questionnaire, i.e. the intellectual and
human capital of the founders, the financial resources, the technological competencies and IPRs, the relationships with other firms and organizations. This chapter, thus, focuses on these four dimensions and their relative relevance to the creation of a new firm in a cross-country and cross-sector perspective. More specifically, the analysis is conducted on a group of European new and innovative firms in technological contexts that experienced strong innovative and competitive dynamics in the last 15 years. New and innovative firms, i.e. new innovators, are defined as firms that innovate within a relatively short time after their establishment and are both knowledge-intensive (i.e. active in science-based and science-driven sectors) and technology-based (i.e. patenting in sophisticated and dynamic technological contexts). The next sections detail the methodology implemented and the results of the questionnaire.
