A common phenomenon in entrepreneurship is that employees turn away from employment to found their own businesses. Prior literature discusses the former employers’ characteristics that influence the creation of entrepreneurial ventures. An investigation of whether these characteristics also...

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...

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...

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...