ABSTRACT
Along these three perspectives, this book tries to answer the following questions. What are the conceptual building blocks of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship? What are the factors affecting it? How relevant is it across technologies? What are its main characteristics in advanced European countries? And in transition economies? What are its main features across industries and sectoral systems? This chapter aims to set the broad framework that has shaped this book and at the same time intends to start answering these questions. It refers to the various chapters of this book that represent extensive revisions of the contributions developed and written for the European research project KEINS supported by EU DG Research (Knowledge base entrepreneurship: institutions, networks and systems, EU project no. CT2-CT-2004-506022). However this chapter refers also to other contributions that have been part of the KEINS project and that touch relevant issues related to knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship but that are not in this book for reasons of space. In the pages that follow there are papers that are referred to as ‘KEINS’. These other contributions can be found at www. kites.unibocconi.it (then go to ‘Research networks’ and then to ‘KEINS’ and to ‘Deliverables’ in order to download these papers). This chapter is organized in the following way. In Section 2 the means and measures of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship are discussed. Then in Sections 3, 4 and 5 the main building blocks are examined: innovation (Section 3), knowledge (Section 4) and innovation systems (Section 5). Section 6 focuses on the European case and provides a quantitative view of new innovators and of academic inventors. In Section 7 the analysis then shifts to two surveys on knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship, one done in Western Europe and the other in Central and Eastern Europe. Finally, in Section 8, the main features of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in specific industries and sectoral systems are presented. Some policy implications close the chapter.
