Knowledge Accessibility and New Firm Formation

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of knowledge for successful entrepreneurship. The paper explicitly discusses the role of accessibility to university and company R&D for new firm formation. Company R&D is assumed to contain a higher share of R&D directed towards generating technological knowledge. Hence, the accessibility to such R&D are expected to have a stronger influence on new firm formation than the accessibility to university R&D. Since knowledge can also be assumed to be spatially bounded and diffuses in geographical space, it is argued that local interaction, measured by intra-municipality accessibility to knowledge, have a stronger influence on new firm formation than interregional interaction. In the empirical analysis data on new firm formation in 288 Swedish municipalities and accessibility to university and company R&D for 1997 and 1999 are used. We find that accessibility to company R&D have a stronger impact on new firm formation than accessibility to university R&D. We also find that close knowledge interactions are more important for new firm formation than long distance knowledge interactions. Accessibility to inter-regional company R&D has even a negative impact on new firm formation.

Accessibility to Knowledge and New Firm Formation in Sweden

“…The values are found by Johansson et al (2003b) by using Swedish commuting data for 1998. A similar approach has previously been used by Karlsson and Nyström (2006), where they investigated the impact of a set of selected knowledge firms on industries of different kinds.…”

Public funds and local biotechnology firm creation

“…Our study adds to the findings of these two studies and introduces a number of methodological and measurement improvements. For instance, these previous studies do not distinguish between the type of organization that receives the public funding and performs the R&D. Here, we recognize the potential for differential efficiencies between industrial and academic R&D organizations on the rate of firm creation (Bade and Nerlinger, 2000;Karlsson and Nyström, 2011) and examine the impacts of public R&D funds directed to universities, private firms, research institutes and research hospitals separately. The two previous studies have also measured the impact of federal R&D outlays on firm creation in the biotechnology industry for rather short periods of time (up to two years).…”

“…In this study we focus on the question of whether publicly funded R&D expenditures lead to firm births in knowledge-intensive industries and in particular in biotechnology. A number of studies have examined the relationship between R&D expenditures and firm births but most have not delineated the sources of funds that support R&D (Bade and Nerlinger, 2000;Goetz and Morgan, 1995;Karlsson and Nyström, 2011;Kim et al, 2011;Kirchhoff et al, 2007;Woodward et al, 2006). Accordingly, our knowledge on the impact of public R&D funding on firm creation is limited.…”

Knowledge, innovation and space: introduction

“…The spatial perspective highlights the importance of spatial frictions as a factor limiting knowledge transfers and spillovers, and make it clear that excludability of knowledge is not only a result of patents, business secrets and so on, but also a consequence of limited physical accessibility and the time and money costs involved in spatial interaction (Karlsson and Nyström, 2011). In this picture of the global knowledge economy, we can identify a particular role played by intra-organization networks of multinational corporations (Almeida and Phene, 2012).…”