While the number of green start-ups has steadily increased around the world in response to the environmental problems demanding immediate solutions, there are several unresolved questions on the behaviour and performance of such ventures. The papers in this special issue shed light on these issues by underscoring the role of several factors, such as industry life cycles, knowledge spillovers, institutions, and availability of external finance, in shaping decision-making and firm behaviour in green start-ups. This paper highlights the state-of-the-art developments in the literature, discusses the key contributions of the papers put together in this special issue, and presents a future research agenda for scholars interested in green entrepreneurship.

shown that academics are essentially motivated by learning opportunities, fundraising and satisfaction derived from puzzle solving in research activities, our paper provides evidence of the positive role of an additional motivation for both the breadth and depth of KT: the extent to which the academic scientist advances the societal role of universities ("mission" motivation). We find that both "funding" and "mission" motivations have a positive effect on the variety and intensity of KT activities, with little effect for learning opportunities. Our results show also a higher effect of "funding" and "mission" on the depth of KT activities compared to their breadth.

This paper focuses on the role of human capital in reducing the

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This paper investigates the relationship between green/non-green technologies and firm growth. By combining the literature on eco-innovations, industrial organisation and entrepreneurial studies, we examine the dependence of this relationship on the pace at which firms grow and the age of the firm. From a dataset of 5498 manufacturing firms in Italy for the period of 2000-2008, longitudinal fixed effects quantile models are estimated, in which the firm's age is set to moderate the effects of green and non-green patents on employment growth. We find that the positive effect of green technologies on growth is greater than that of non-green technologies. However, this result does not apply to struggling and rapidly growing firms. With fast-growing (above the median) firms, age moderates the growth effect of green technologies. Inconsistent with the extant literature, this moderation effect is positive: firm experience appears important for the growth benefits of green technologies, possibly relative to the complexity of their management.

In this work it is contended the idea that, even though FDI has been at the center of the analysis for a long time, economic literature has not still adopted a unified framework for the investigation of the issue at stake. Indeed, despite some important exceptions, above all Dunning (1993), motivations have been highly disregarded from the current analysis. We put forward the idea that motives underlying what we have called a "cherry picking" activity must be considered essential cause they shape and direct the different alternatives available to the firm. Moreover, a well structured motive-based taxonomy concerning FDI decision is presented, composed by three main parts: (i) resource seeking, (ii) market seeking and (iii) non-marketable asset seeking. Finally, the effects of a set of factors on FDI decision are taken into account. We start by pointing out that empirical literature has found seemingly contradictory results on the effects of several variables on inward/outward FDI decisions. Indeed, it is shown that useful insights can be drawn from our taxonomy taking a closer look at the empirical literature dealing with factors affecting FDI decision.

Exploration is both an important part of a firm's innovation strategy and an activity that involves a high degree of uncertainty. This paper investigates a duality in the exploratory component of R&D activity with regard to innovation failure: while exploration is likely to increase firms' exposure to failure, it might also provide learning opportunities to reduce failure. Our study contributes to the innovation management and organisational learning literatures by demonstrating the value of exploratory R&D for enabling two types of learning mechanisms. The first, experience-based learning, is based on the learning opportunities derived from accumulated experience in exploratory R&D: it involves improvements to procedures associated with experimentation and provides guidance for current exploration and to navigate the search space.The second, inferential-based learning, is based on the learning opportunities derived from current exploratory R&D efforts, which are associated with improved interpretation of ill-defined problems and timely responses to unstructured information. We draw on a longitudinal dataset of 2,226 Spanish manufacturing companies and show that, when past experience is associated with current exploration, innovation failure in the conception phase is reduced. We also find an inverted U-shaped relation between current exploratory R&D and innovation failure, in both the conception and implementation phases of innovation projects, showing that increasing levels of investment in current exploration activities attenuate the initial positive association between exploratory R&D and failure.

This paper investigates the relationship between engagement in consulting activities and the research performance of academic scientists. The study relies on a sample of 2678 individual faculty, from five Spanish universities, who have been recipients of publicly funded grants or have been principal investigators in activities contracted by external agents over the period [1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004]. By implementing a propensity score matching estimator method, we show that engaging in consulting activities has an overall negative relationship with the average number of ISIpublications. However, the effect of consulting on the scientific productivity of academic scientists depends on the scientific fields and the intensity of engagement in consulting activities. Academic consulting is found to be negatively correlated with the number of publications in the fields of 'Natural and Exact Sciences' and 'Engineering', but not in the case of 'Social Sciences and Humanities'. When the intensity of consulting activity is taken into account at the discipline level, we find that engaging in consulting activities is negatively correlated with scientific productivity only for high levels of involvement in consulting activities, but not for moderate ones.