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We study how social capital induces performance spillover effects in an industry network of entrepreneurs building their own hydroelectric micro-power plants. Most of them are farmers and novices living in rural areas. There is a link between social capital and performance at firm level. By expanding the level of analysis to dyads, we find that entrepreneurs lacking social capital can compensate for this through cohesion with colleagues rich in social capital. Entrepreneurs can also benefit by mimicking the networking patterns of successful colleagues, gaining access to equivalent resources developed in the niche.

The focus in this paper is to study whether business incubation can provide entrepreneurial start-ups with critical network resources. We make a distinction between incubator-provided network resources and start-ups' "own" external network resources that are unrelated to the incubator context. Although there has been an increasing number of studies examining incubated entrepreneurs' network resources, to our knowledge, this is the first study that explicitly compares incubator-provided network resources and start-ups' own external network resources. Analyzing the results from qualitative interviews with start-up tenants at a technology incubator in Bergen, Norway, we find that network resources acquired by the start-ups' own efforts (rather than network resources facilitated by an incubator) were most critical in all phases of enterprise development. They played a crucial role in terms of idiosyncratic (non-generic) knowledge generation as drivers of innovation, catalysts for financial contributors, and as a means to organizational reputation and market access. Nevertheless, internal networking with other incubator firms and external network resources facilitated by the incubator were also helpful and complementary, but they were more generic in nature and provided limited idiosyncratic resources. We also found that incubator network resources tend to have traits similar to those of identity-based network resources because they are not mainly governed by economic interests, but at the same time, they are not path-dependent. Inter-tenant network resources, therefore, can have nonbinding weak-ties properties and provide non-redundant information.

Efficient inter-firm coproduction in the tourism industry can bear a resemblance to the concept of small-worlds, typically characterized by pockets of local clusters and shortcut ties that connect and decrease path-length between clustered network members. In this paper we analyze survey and inter-firm network data across several winter destinations, finding that innovating firms can reduce path-length, but uncertainty is a necessary catalyst for this process to take place.

The branding of tourism destinations has received increased attention, with scholars typically focusing at the regional level or on the customer demand side. This study takes the firm as its level of analysis and explores whether interfirm network position is related to the use of the destination brand as an explicit marketing strategy. Firms' use of the destination brand can be described as a co-branding strategy. We apply an unusual combination of survey and social network data across several tourism destinations. The results show that firms with interfirm ties to other central firms in the extended network (closeness centrality) co-brand with the destination brand, but we do not find a similar effect for firms with ties in the local network (degree centrality). The use of instrumental variables indicates that closeness centrality is a cause, and not an effect, of co-branding.

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