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The emergence of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship

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Abstract

In the past decade, a new and promising literature has been established linking endogenous growth theory to knowledge spillovers and entrepreneurship theory: the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE). This study conducts a bibliometric analysis of scholarly research on this fruitful and promising strand of the literature. It highlights the increasing importance and acceptance of KSTE in the scientific community worldwide, its emergence across different fields in economics, management and policy and also the issues and questions raised. Based on all articles on KSTE published in refereed journals in the past 15 years (1999–2013), we identify the key academic journals, the main issues and subjects addressed and the backward and forward citations. We also identify the authors and their connections in terms of coauthorships to reconstruct the scientific community debating on KSTE. We are confident that our work will benefit scholars intending to leverage KSTE in their research in that it summarizes the main academic conversations within this theoretical perspective and set the boundaries of the network of scholars developing it.

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Notes

  1. See also Carlsson et al. (2013) for a survey highlighting and summarizing the evolving domain of entrepreneurship research in the past decades.

  2. They totaled 824 citations.

  3. http://www.scopus.com. We entered the terms “Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship” (query 1) and “Knowledge Spillover Entrepreneurship" (query 2) in the “Search for” box of Scopus. To avoid being too narrow in our search for target articles, we added one more query (query 3) to include contributions that used synonyms of the term entrepreneurship. These synonyms were generated basing on the keywords of the articles resulting from query 1 and query 2. Accordingly, query 3 is: “knowledge spillovers” AND (“new ventures” OR “new business” OR “startup” OR “startups” OR “start up” OR “start-up” OR “start-ups” OR “new firm creation” OR “new firm formation”). To circumvent overlapping in the results of the three queries, we included in query 2 and 3 exclusion conditions for the results of the previous queries. Consequently, the articles resulting from query 2 were in addition to articles resulting from query 1 and articles resulting from query 3 were in addition to articles resulting from query 1 and 2.

  4. http://www8.umu.se/inforsk/Bibexcel/.

  5. Two articles that were classified as article in press during the searching process have been published in 2014.

  6. Important contributions like Audretsch and Feldman (1996) or Acs and Audretsch (1987, 1988) are excluded, since their main focus is on economics of innovation in general and less on entrepreneurship and knowledge spillovers.

  7. As backward citations (hereafter: references), we intend the citations that the 52 articles made to other scholarly contributions (articles or books). In conducting our analysis, we distinguish between internal references and external references. A reference is internal (external) if one of the articles cites another article included (excluded) in this literature review.

  8. The complete list of external references is available from the authors upon request.

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Ghio, N., Guerini, M., Lehmann, E.E. et al. The emergence of the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship. Small Bus Econ 44, 1–18 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-014-9588-y

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