New innovators and knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in European sectoral systems: a field analysis

This chapter is about the characteristics and factors of survival and success of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship in some sectoral systems in Europe. Literature and evidence on the US case are rather rich and detailed but the European case is relatively less explored and documented. Also, in both cases, existing studies are concentrated on a limited number of sectors. They rarely take on a cross-sector cut. Differently, this chapter proposes a cross-sector and cross-country comparison at the European level with a specific focus on some key elements in the process leading to the birth, start-up and early evolution of a new firm. In particular, this chapter reports and comments on the results of a survey conducted on a sample of companies defined as new innovators, i.e. recently founded firms able to innovate soon after entry into the market, and active in selected technologies characterized by strong innovative and competitive dynamics in the last 15 years: biotechnology, electronics and medical devices. In the rest of the chapter, we first present the research streams that inspired this work and from which we draw the main dimensions to be analysed (Section 2). We next present the methodology used in this study (Section 3) and describe and comment the results of the questionnaire (Section 4). Finally, we present some concluding remarks (Section 5)