Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum

After examining 4247 articles in 10 journals between 2010 and 2020, we found only 11.7% ( n = 497) included explicit policy recommendations, and just 1.4% ( n = 60) had explicit policy implications subsections. We analysed these 60 articles using behaviourally anchored rating scales (BARS) to assess four key aspects of the policy implications for quality and practicality. Policy implications were generally based on methodologically transparent research, but often lacked rigour in detailing policy and regulatory requirements, and typically demanded significant resources for implementation. Our results contribute to theory by improving our understanding of the why, when and how of policy implications of entrepreneurship research. Also, our BARS framework allows for a differentiation between quality and practical applicability, thereby reframing assumptions by showing that impactful policy implications require both methodological quality and implementation feasibility. Overall, the research–policy gap in entrepreneurship results not merely from disengagement but also research–policy misalignment in content and form.

Abstract International research collaboration is essential for tackling global challenges, many of which disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), while scientific capital remains concentrated in high-income countries (HICs). Drawing on CRediT contributorship data from 2018-2023 and past and present author affiliations, this study examines how labor is divided in teams between researchers from countries with different economic resources, offering new insights into the role of mobility in addressing structural disparities. Our findings reveal a pronounced divide: data collection is primarily conducted in LMICs, while data analysis and publication efforts are concentrated in HICs. Although often collaborative, conceptualization is more frequently led by scientists with past or present HIC ties, reinforcing ongoing debates about intellectual ownership. Mobile researchers with past and present ties to both HICs and LMICs emerge as key contributors to conceptualization and writing, leveraging their unique position to integrate awareness of LMIC challenges with scientific capital in HICs. By shedding light on how access to scientific capital shapes contributions within international teams, this study informs policy efforts to foster more equitable collaborations that align with the needs of LMICs, ensuring global research can effectively tackle pressing challenges.

Abstract Most advanced industrialized countries today justify their innovation policies on the basis of the dominant knowledge-based growth paradigm—primarily investment in R&D and education, as we saw in Chap.2. However, in terms of how growth policy should be formulated, this provides an incomplete guide which even borders on the misleading. The reason behind this misguided thinking is simplistic assumptions, both about how an economy functions and about the innovation process itself. Innovation is still seen as an exogenous force that can be stimulated through government funding targeting R&D, start-ups, and small businesses, which will then fuel higher growth and increased prosperity.

Professor Per Davidsson is the recipient of the 2023 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Throughout an extraordinarily productive career, he has made invaluable contributions in building the field of entrepreneurship. His early studies on entrepreneurship and culture and his studies on the growth of small businesses played an important role in the emergence and development of entrepreneurship as a scholarly field of research. He has also, continuously, made more conceptual contributions by critically probing the development of the field, and engaged in writing foundational books that have been used extensively in higher education institutes. By probing and challenging traditional assumptions throughout his career, he has contributed to the refinement and renewal of the field.

This paper explores the emergence of micro-level creative tensions and their interplay within collaborative innovation projects. Our findings demonstrate how, at the microlevel, an evolving set of actors, activities and artifacts support collaborative innovation in science-based SMEs. Our analysis highlights how activities and artifacts are linked through creative tensions emerging from situations of close interaction between diverse actors. We demonstrate how a mutually constitutive duality captures the paradoxical nature of creative tensions. Furthermore, our findings show how actors employ ambidexterity in navigating and harnessing creative tensions and develop artifacts that create value. We propose a framework that captures micro-level value creation in collaborative innovation. We suggest three research propositions that explore interconnectedness between actors from diverse backgrounds, diversity of knowledge and skills in contributing to innovation activities, and ambidexterity in navigating creative tensions in developing artifacts in the form of innovative products, services and processes.

ABSTRACT Software is at the core of digitalisation and is often claimed to play a central role in innovation and in shaping competition across industries and firms. There are yet few studies of the extent and nature of software development across firms. We employ a unique firm-level survey comprising 3,929 firms across Sweden to analyse the distribution and characteristics of firms that invest in software development and the orientation of their investments. The results confirm that software development activities are present in most industries, but heterogeneously distributed across firms. Internal software development is associated with innovation-oriented large firms in high-tech and knowledge-intensive industries, and is often affiliated with MNEs. The results suggest that software development is comparable to R&D investments and constitutes an example of digital innovation. This strengthens the value of studying software development activities to understand how firms invest in and build competitive advantage in the digitalised economy.

Spatial variations in rates of new firm formation are large and spatially persistent over long periods of time. A common explanation of this empirical regularity is so-called local entrepreneurship cultures, which refer to spatially embedded social characteristics that change in slow processes. This paper discusses perspectives on the development of such cultures and focuses on the role of historical industry structures in forming the long-run entrepreneurial character of regions. To illustrate the empirical relevance of arguments and findings in the literature, we use historical data on voting patterns in municipalities in Sweden, as well as indications of their early industrial concentrations, and assess their correlations with present-day entrepreneurial activity. We show that places with a high share of left-wing votes in the period 1917–1948 and early historical presence of heavy industry have lower rates of new firm formation, less positive public attitudes toward entrepreneurship as well as larger average establishment sizes in the twenty-first century. The empirical patterns are consistent with the argument that regions’ historical industry structure is one factor that influences the development of local entrepreneurship cultures.

Recent attempts to conceptualize the multi-level governance of transformative innovation policy make strong arguments in favour of pursuing societal challenges at the subnational scale. This article suggests, that these recent efforts risk falling into a scalar trap, because they rely on a theoretical assumption about the policy effectiveness of the subnational scale. In response, the paper proposes a constructivist approach to the spatial organization of transformative innovation policy. The constructivist approach views scale as continuously produced and contested by actors. Moreover, it suggests that rescaling may be an important aspect of multi-level governance of transformative innovation policy because it has the potential to alter the influence of actors in the prevailing socio-technical system. The approach is illustrated with an empirical analysis of waste management in Denmark where a transformative innovation policy has recently been introduced, rescaling decision-making away from a traditionally strong subnational scalar arrangement.

ABSTRACT Do workers benefit from proximity to other workers with similar skill sets? This question dates back at least to Alfred Marshall. We use occupation groups to proxy skill sets and show that the answer likely depends on geographical levels, as well on regional hierarchy. Using longitudinal Swedish data, we document robust evidence consistent with highly localized spillovers at the level of sub-city districts between individuals in similar occupations. We further demonstrate less distance-sensitive benefits of working in districts and regions, characterized by high overall density (of employees in other occupations). We find no evidence of benefits from overall density outside Sweden’s three main metropolitan areas.

Do local development policies influence local employment growth? Based on a survey to municipal managers in all Swedish municipalities, this is one of the first studies to empirically assess the relationship between reported local development initiatives (entrepreneurial governance (EG)) and growth of local employment. We find a weak but significant association between EG and employment growth for urban municipalities. This suggests that EG is more effective in larger, growing municipalities than in smaller, declining rural areas. Urban municipalities may of course have more resources for entrepreneurial governance than rural ones as they have grown substantially faster for a long period of time. The result thus indicates that EG and growth are in a positive interplay of interaction. When the EG index was divided into three sub-indexes after the entrepreneurial process (discover or create opportunities, collect resources and exploit opportunities) the analyses also showed positive correspondence between some sub-indexes and employment growth for the rural municipalities, indicating that EG is not solely a phenomenon connected to growth in urban, growing municipalities. In sum, the article indicates several avenues through which entrepreneurial governance at local level might be linked to local growth.