The creation of spin-off companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these “university” spin-offs like industry...

COVID-19 placed a special role on fiscal policy in rescuing companies short of liquidity from insolvency. In the first months of the crisis, SMEs as the backbone of Germany's economy benefited from large and mainly indiscriminate aid measures. Avoiding business failures in a whatever-it-takes...

Improving the economic conditions for small and medium sized firms as well as start-ups is high on the agenda of policy makers. In this paper we discuss some policy options for fostering the creation of new enterprises. The discussion focuses on measures which aim at helping start-ups to...

This paper studies the effects of local market attributes on local firms’ exports of innovations. Our starting point are three common hypotheses. First, innovations are a major determinant for the export performance of firms. Second, user–producer interaction is an important factor for...

It is known that small firms rely mainly on the CEO’s individual knowledge for developing innovations. Recent work suggests that this approach is inefficient since it underutilizes other employees’ knowledge. We study to which extent using CEOs, managers and non-managerial employees’ ideas...

This paper considers the effect of different firm leadership on the innovative performance of firms from seven EU countries. We investigate whether owner-led or manager-led firms achieve a larger share of their turnover with product innovations. Economic theory does not propose clear answers to...