Gábor Mayer, Balint Filep , Zsuzsanna Pupp (p)

Smart Specialization Strategy conceived within the Cohesion policy of the European Commission place Universities in an increasingly significant role in regional economy development. Their innovation ecosystem can enhance connections and communication between HEIs, research institutions, innovative industry, government and the society resulting in a wider stakeholder involvement in knowledge economy development. There have been various European and national initiatives to support R&D, innovation as well as creative industry developments for both industrial actors and local organizations to strengthen high added value activities. Through the development of higher educational innovation ecosystem, cities will be also developed as well as their whole region, because they have a close relation to each other and can’t be interpreted in themselves. The above mentioned direction generate new challenges for universities, local government, companies, and other institutions cooperate with each other.
We shortly look at role of higher education in economic development and the local government – industry – university cooperation in Hungary to find out how policies and funding programmes helped the establishment of quadruple helix partnerships. A common regional development instrument in our examples are Science and Technology Parks as providers of an environment that enhances entrepreneurial mindset, innovation-culture and creativity. We try to understand structures in government initiatives and development strategies that cultivate innovation.

Victoria Price (p), Darja Reuschke

Within the small business and entrepreneurship literature, empirical evidence has been presented both for and against what has been coined ‘the female under-performance hypothesis’. Several studies have demonstrated that the performance gap between men and women-owned businesses is mediated when using multivariate quantitative analysis that controls for firm characteristics. However, little attention has been paid to the spatial context of gender and small business, in particular, whether the business is run from the residential home of the owner or in an external premise. Significant proportions of the smallest enterprises in the UK are run from home and it has been found that female business owners may be more likely to start a business at home, but that this comes at the expense of the financial success of their enterprise. It remains unclear whether or how locating a business in the home creates disadvantage for female business owners and whether this contributes to the overall under-performance of women-owned small businesses across different indicators. The objective of this study therefore, is to investigate whether women-owned small businesses under-perform those owned by men on a number of performance measures (turnover, innovation, and employment) and how this is influenced by the location in the home and within the wider region. Further, in measuring employment creation, we also include subcontractors who do not traditionally appear in measures of business size, to test whether home-based businesses may subcontract out work rather than take on employees within the spatially restricted home environment, and whether women are more likely to pursue this performance pathway than men are. The empirical, quantitative analysis utilises a representative sample of 8,725 small businesses from the 2015 UK Longitudinal Small Business Survey (UKLSBS). Multiple regression models are estimated, including controls for key firm demographics and interaction terms between gender, the home and urban-rural location. The main findings from this study reveal gender disparities that differ from previous research: women-owned small businesses are employment generators. They do appear to have lower turnover than men-owned small businesses but women-owned enterprises, particularly those in the home, have significantly more employees. There are no significant gender differences in terms of innovation. These findings call for more context-aware research from gender and business studies. Women emerge from this study as job creators, which is of direct importance for economic development and policy that seeks to foster small business and entrepreneurship in order to create local employment opportunities.

Michael Wyrwich (p), Pedro de Faria, Florian Noseleit, Philip Steinberg

Our study contributes to the literature on organizational imprinting and on determinants of firm cooperation by understanding how socioeconomic context of the entrepreneur is imprinted on the strategic choice sets of the created venture namely R&D cooperation strategies. We hypothesize that ventures created by individuals socialized in trust-reducing institutional environments are less likely to engage in inter-organizational R&D cooperation. Furthermore, we argue that the negative effect of founders being socialized in trust-reducing institutional environments on the likelihood of ventures to engage in inter-organizational R&D cooperation is lower when these founders were exposed to influences of trust-promoting institutional environments. We can partly confirm our hypotheses by analyzing a representative survey of German start-ups where founders were socialized in different institutional regimes before German re-unification in 1990.