Small businesses provide catalytic benefits to the economy. They contribute to national output, and to the society as a whole, beyond the spending and profit they generate. The role of SMEs is crucial for the European economic recovery – their number, employment capacity and value added...

Agglomeration can generate gains. If it does, how does it work and how are those gains distributed across agglomerated firms? Despite the existence of an important body of research on this topic, the evidence is inconclusive. We examine the effect of localization externalities on a firm’s...

This paper considers the financing of a research project under uncertainty about the time of completion and the probability of eventual success.The uncertainty about future success gradually diminishes with the arrival of additional funding.The entrepreneur controls the funds and can divert...

Taking into account both competence and governance issues, and six dimensions of tie strength, this article argues that in networks for exploration there are good reasons, counter to the thesis of the 'strength of weak ties', for a dense structure of ties that are strong in most dimensions.By...

This chapter offers a theory and an analytical framework for the analysis of cluster dynamics, i.e. the innovative performance and evolution of clusters.It develops three types of embedding: institutional embedding, structural embedding (network structure), and relational embedding (type and...

This survey reviews the growing body of academic work on venture capital. It lays out the major data sources used. It examines the work on venture capital investments in companies, looking at issues of selection, contracting, post-investment services and exits. The survey considers recent work...

This article provides empirical tests of the hypothesis of optimal cognitive distance , proposed by Nooteboom (1999, 2000), in two distinct empirical settings.Variety of cognition, needed for learning, has two dimensions: the number of agents with different cognition, and differences in...