Erik E. Lehmann

Entrepreneurial Access and Absorption of Knowledge Spillovers: Strategic Board and Managerial Composition for Competitive Advantage

The resource theory of the firm implies that knowledge is a key resource bestowing a competitive advantage for entrepreneurial firms. However, it remains rather unclear up to now how new ventures and small businesses can access knowledge resources. The purpose of this study was to suggest two strategies, in particular, that facilitate entrepreneurial access to and absorption of external knowledge spillovers: the attraction of managers and directors with an academic background. Based on data on board composition of 295 high‐technology firms, the results clearly demonstrate the strong link between geographical proximity to research‐intense universities and board composition.

Financing High-Tech Growth: The Role of Banks and Venture Capitalists

Using a data set of the firms listed on the Neuer Markt in Germany, we demonstrate that venture-backed firms differ from firms with other financial resources, especially debt. Thus, the results of this study support the hypothesis that small and innovative firms are more likely to be financed by venture capitalists rather than banks. We also provide evidence that the presence of venture capitalists enhance the growth rates of firms positively.

Mansfield's Missing Link: The Impact of Knowledge Spillovers on Firm Growth

The purpose of this paper is to provide a link between two of the seminal contributions of Edwin Mansfield. The first focuses on the determinants of firm growth and the second is concerned with university-based knowledge spillovers. By linking both firm-specific characteristics as well as access to knowledge spillovers from universities, the empirical evidence found in this paper suggests that knowledge spillovers as well as firm-specific characteristics influence firm growth.

Agency and Governance in Strategic Entrepreneurship

This paper aims to highlight the opportunity to contribute to our understanding of strategic entrepreneurship by exploring the construct through the lens of agency theory. In particular, we claim a fundamental link between a new ventures control of critical resources and the distribution of equity between the principal and agent. According to agency theory, assigning top executives ownership in the firm provides arrangements that are compatible with the incentives of the owners of the firm. This paper suggests that agency theory has special relevance when considered in a strategic entrepreneurship context. This is because the function of managers in entrepreneurial new ventures is fundamentally different from their counterparts in large established, incumbent corporations. While both types of managers have to provide managerial and organizational expertise, managers in entrepreneurial new ventures have an additional function that is essential to the competitive advantage and performance of the new venture—providing knowledge and human capital, which, in many cases, is intrinsically linked to the capital resources of the new venture. Our framework is tested using patent ownership as a proxy for both relationship–specific investments and indispensable human capital of the top manager of the new venture. The empirical results support the main hypotheses posited by the entrepreneurial governance model. In particular, patent ownership of the top manager significantly increases the percentage of equity held, while the number of patents held by the firm significantly decreases the percentage of ownership.

Do Locational Spillovers Pay? Empirical Evidence from German IPO Data

This study examines the impact that locational spillovers have on firm performance. On the basis of a uniquely created data set consisting of high-technology start-ups publicly listed in Germany, this paper tests the proposition of locational spillovers positively affecting firm performance, as measured by abnormally high profits on the stock market. The results provide evidence that geographic proximity and university spillovers are complementary determinants of firm performance. Although neither geographic proximity nor academic research spillovers alone can explain firm performance, a combination of both factors results in significant higher stock market performance. The results also show that academic spillovers are heterogeneous in their impact, depending on the type. In particular, spillovers from social sciences have a different impact on firm performance than do spillovers from natural sciences.

Pricing Behavior on the WEB: Evidence from Online Travel Agencies

There have been many claims that the Internet represents a nearly frictionless market. This paper extends the empirical results on online retailing by studying prices for nearly homogenous services - holiday packages - matched across conventional and Internet channels. On first sight, lower average prices in Internet trade appear to signal more intensive price-competition. At the same time, the Internet market place is characterised by greater price dispersion. This rather suggests that search inefficiencies are more significant in electronic trade. It therefore remains an open issue whether Internet trade can be associated with a more competitive market structure than the conventional market.

Entrepreneurial Human Capital, Complementary Assets, and Takeover Probability

Although acquisitions of high tech entrepreneurial firms are of great popularity, the limited empirical evidence shows that these acquisitions often lead to dismal results in that a large number of acquired inventors leave the company after the acquisition and those that remain exhibit poor performance. This study tries to explain this phenomenon and adds additional empirical results and explanations which are based on the seminal work of Grossman, Hart, and Moore. Using a hand collected dataset of all German IPOs from 1997 until 2006 we show that the takeover probability of young and high tech firms significantly decreases with the amount of patents as a measure of intangible and complementary assets owned by the owner-manager.

Adverse Selection and Market Substitution by Electronic Trade

Adverse selection induces economic limits to market substitution. If quality uncertainty persists in both Internet and traditional marketplaces, a second-best equilibrium with parallel market segments may arise. The information cost advantage of one marketplace is exactly offset by a more severe adverse selection problem associated with non-observable quality variables. The electronic marketplace providing dominant search means contains all segments, while the traditional market may lack some segments. These missing segments are characterized by low quality expectations given the set of advertised quality signals. The analytic results are confirmed by an empirical investigation of used-car trade. Thus the study also provides an estimate of the price differential between the electronic and the traditional marketplace.

The Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship and Technological Diffusion

The prevailing theories of entrepreneurship have typically revolved around the ability of individuals to recognize opportunities and act on them by starting new ventures. This has generated a literature asking why entrepreneurial behavior varies across individuals with different characteristics, while implicitly holding the external context in which the individual finds oneself to be constant. Thus, where the opportunities come from, or the source of entrepreneurial opportunities, are also implicitly taken as given. By contrast, we provide a theory identifying at least one source of entrepreneurial opportunity – new knowledge and ideas that are not fully commercialized by the organization actually investing in the creation of that knowledge. The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship holds individual characteristics as given, but lets the context vary. In particular, high knowledge contexts are found to generate more entrepreneurial opportunities, where the entrepreneur serves as a conduit for knowledge spillovers. By contrast, impoverished knowledge contexts are found to generate fewer entrepreneurial opportunities. By serving as a conduit for knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurship is the missing link between investments in new knowledge and economic growth. Thus, the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship provides not just an explanation of why entrepreneurship has become more prevalent as the factor of knowledge has emerged as a crucial source for comparative advantage, but also why entrepreneurship plays a vital role in generating economic growth. Entrepreneurship is an important mechanism permeating the knowledge filter to facilitate the spillover of knowledge, and ultimately generating economic growth.

Der relative Vorteil deutscher wirtschaftswissenschaftlicher Fachbereiche im Wettbewerb um studentischen Zuspruch: Qualität des Studiengangs oder des Studienortes?

SummaryThe media, as well as economic and political advisors emphasize the disciplinary virtue of introducing „quality competition“ among German universities. Competing for prospective students should set incentives in designing innovative study programs. However, all available quality indicators for such programs — whether taken from management journal rankings, or measuring scientific productivity — currently prove to be statistically insignificant when investigating the choices of prospective students of managerial economics in Germany. The students only appear to respond to locational characteristics associated with the university sites.