We investigate the role of entrepreneurship culture and the historical knowledge base of a region on current levels of new business formation in innovative industries. The analysis is for German regions and covers the time period 1907-2014. We find a pronounced positive relationship between high...

New business formation plays an important role for economic development. Therefore, policy makers put emphasis on fostering start-up activity. Aims and scope of entrepreneurs can be just as heterogeneous as the structure of new ventures. The project "New business formation and the labor market...

The discussion on regional innovation systems emphasizes the duality of local and global links. While the former enable effective knowledge exchange between regional actors, the latter are considered to provide regional systems with knowledge diverse to their knowledge base. Our empirical...

We analyze the emergence and spatial evolution of the German laser systems industry. Regional knowledge in the related field of laser sources, as well as the presence of universities with physics or engineering departments, is conducive to the emergence of laser systems suppliers. The regional...

Based on detailed information about the regional knowledge base, particularly about universities, we find that regional public research and education have a strong positive impact on new business formation in innovative industries but not in industries classified as non-innovative. Measures for...

We investigate the role played by different fields of academic knowledge and various types of higher education institutions in the emergence of innovative start-ups in a region. We show that education and research in the applied and natural sciences have the strongest effect on the emergence of...

We analyze information and knowledge transfer in a sample of 16 German regional innovation networks with almost 300 firms and research organizations involved. The results indicate that strong ties are more beneficial for the exchange of knowledge and information than weak ties. Moreover, our...