Despite broad agreement on the strategic role of SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) in industrial renewal processes, the lack of systematized and comprehensive information on the nature and level of small innovative firms is striking. This bias is partly explained by an empirical shadow...

This paper examines small innovative entrepreneurs by contrasting patenting firms against non-patenting firms. The empirical analysis is based on new and unique data on internal attributes, location and international trade characteristics for over 20 000 manufacturing firms in Sweden with 1-25...

The general motivation for this paper is the current interest in globalization as a phenomenon that strongly affects the conditions of local economic development. Our purpose is to contribute to some of the current development aspects, in particular those that foster the evolution of...

In recent decades the world has witnessed the emergence of a global knowledge economy. For example, the evolution in recent decades of the developed economies has been accompanied by a regional shift in economic activity away from traditional industrial regions to new agglomerations of high...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of entrepreneurship and innovations for economic development in functional regions and in doing that highlighting the different conditions offered for entrepreneurship and innovations in functional regions of various sizes. In conclusion, the...

We use longitudinal data over a decade on start-ups and employment in Swedish regions and analyze the effect of start-ups on subsequent employment growth. We extend previous analyses by examining the influence of regional start-ups in a sector on regional employment growth in the same sector and...

In this paper, we analyse where people who become self-employed actually start their firms. In the entrepreneurship literature, it is generally assumed that individuals who start a firm start it where they live. We question this general assumption and show that this does not hold for commuters....

The purpose of the paper is to show how entrepreneurship conditions vary between regions of various sizes, and test the theoretical arguments on why large regions generally should generate more entrepreneurship. The paper empirically ana¬lyzes the role of regional size in explaining...

The entrepreneur is an elusive character in economic theory due to the difficulty of providing an accurate description. It appears impossible to produce a single definition of entrepreneurship and most theoretical approaches yield operational difficulties. By the same token, most operational...

This paper examines innovation among very small firms and provides new insights into both internal and external determinants of patenting. Applying a non-linear panel data approach to about 160,000 observations on manufacturing firms in Sweden for the period 2000–2006, the following facts...