National Systems of Innovation and Entrepreneurship:In Search of a Missing Link

The literature on national systems of innovation (NIS) has neglected the issue ofentrepreneurship because of several incompatibilities between the two notions.The Schumpeterian legacy, the current person-centric view of entrepreneurship,and methodological problems related to treating entrepreneurship at the macrolevel,have made it difficult to integrate entrepreneurship into the NIS perspective.At national level it is more appropriate to treat entrepreneurship as a ‘property’(dimension) of NIS.In order to link NIS and entrepreneurship we must establish a common conceptualbasis. Our argument is that the functional view of NIS and entrepreneurshippresents a common basis for such an approach. We develop criteria for theentrepreneurial NIS which we define as being those that can change balancebetween individual and cooperative entrepreneurship; that enhance both theopportunity and skill aspects of entrepreneurship; and that can balance generationof uncertainty with support to business models and other organisations which pooluncertainty.From the NIS perspective, we explain entrepreneurship as a systemic phenomenondriven by complementarities between technological, market and institutionalopportunities. This framework builds on three research traditions in theentrepreneurship/NIS literature (Schumpeterian, Kirznerian and Listian) whichjointly form a multi-level, multi-dimensional framework for understandingentrepreneurship from a NIS perspective. This framework could be useful as aheuristic for empirical research on entrepreneurship. Finally, we analyse policiesfor entrepreneurship and find that they are highly dependent on underlying andpreviously discussed conceptions of entrepreneurship.....