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Nascent entrepreneurship and inventive activity: a somewhat new perspective

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the nexus between nascent entrepreneurship (NE) and inventive activity. It questions how NE affects inventive activity (including innovation and patenting) while analyzing the views and predictions that have used patenting as an indicator of entrepreneurial behavior. Using data on German researchers and controlling for their personal, professional and institutional attributes, the findings show that NE increases both patenting and innovation. Implications for technology policy are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Note that most of the related literature on innovation treats patenting and inventive activity interchangeably, mainly due to the difficulty of getting data at a fine level of detail that is able to distinguish between the two (see Goel and Rich (2005) for a review). Fortunately, we have that fine level of detail in this micro-level data of German researchers and this enables us to use two alternate dependent variables. However, as the reader will notice, most of the references to the extant literature talk about patent activity, rather than the broader inventive activity.

  2. Unfortunately, from the available information, we are unable determine the percentage NE patent applications that were eventually successful.

  3. Among the rest, 15 % have citizenship of a different European country, 3.5 % originate from China, and 2.8 % from India. Americans and Russians each account for 2.5 % of the sample.

  4. Admittedly, the number of Nobel-prize winners is an imperfect measure of institutional quality, which may be measured along numerous dimensions.

  5. The reluctance to patent with more spinoffs might be due to the reasons discussed in Sect. 2.

  6. In empirical studies, on the other hand, patenting is almost always employed as an explanatory variable to explain why some scientists are more likely to start-up a business or to become an entrepreneur (cf. Krabel and Mueller 2009). It may however be misleading to assume patenting as an ex ante behavior of nascent entrepreneurs.

  7. Also see Sect. 4.2.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Al Link for helpful comments and Viraat Goel for help with the figure. Goel thanks Lund University for hospitality during a research visit. Göktepe-Hulten acknowledges financial support from VINNOVA (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, 61790-4200, USA

    Rajeev K. Goel

  2. Research Policy Institute, School of Economics and Management, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Devrim Göktepe-Hultén

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  1. Rajeev K. Goel
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  2. Devrim Göktepe-Hultén
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Correspondence to Rajeev K. Goel.

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Goel, R.K., Göktepe-Hultén, D. Nascent entrepreneurship and inventive activity: a somewhat new perspective. J Technol Transf 38, 471–485 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-012-9280-9

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