Karin Hellerstedt

Location Attributes and Start-ups in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services

This paper examines start‐ups in knowledge‐intensive business services (KIBS) across Swedish regions by individuals with a formally recognized capacity to produce and develop advanced business services. The empirical analysis focuses on whether their involvement in entrepreneurship may be explained by location attributes. As much as 75 percent of the KIBS founders have prior work experience from business services, suggesting that KIBS start‐ups are more frequent in regions where the KIBS sector is already large. Controlling for the stock of potential entrepreneurs and the stock of KIBS firms, it is shown that variables reflecting both supply‐side conditions and market size influence KIBS start‐up activity. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that KIBS entrepreneurship in a region is stimulated by the simultaneous presence of (i) knowledge resources conducive for the generation and diffusion of knowledge and ideas upon which new firms can be established and (ii) a large market.

Internal Versus External Ownership Transition in Family Firms: An Embeddedness Perspective

We investigate factors that influence family business owners’ choice between passing ownership within the family or to new external owners. Taking an embeddedness perspective focusing on owner–family structure and involvement, we hypothesize that ownership dispersion, number of potential heirs, multigenerational involvement, and whether the chief executive officer is a family member influence the choice of an internal or external transition of ownership. We build a longitudinal data set from a sample of 3,829 family firms and their ownership transitions. Our theorizing and findings regarding ownership transitions complements the abundant research on management succession and therefore constitutes an important contribution to the literature.

Succession in Family Firms

The process of succession in family firms is often both lengthy and complex, and is influenced by factors such as the personal goals of the owner-manager, family structure, ability and ambitions of ...

University Knowledge Spillovers & Regional Start-up Rates: Supply and Demand Side Factors

This paper investigates regional start-up rates in the knowledge intensive services and high-tech industries. Integrating insights from economic geography and population ecology into the literature on entrepreneurship, we develop a theoretical framework which captures how both supply- and demand-side factors mold the regional bedrock for start-ups in knowledge intensive industries. Using multi-level data of all knowledge intensive start-ups across 286 Swedish municipalities between 1994 and 2002 we demonstrate how characteristics of the economic and political milieu within each region influence the ratio of firm births. We find that economically affluent regions dominate entrepreneurial activity in terms of firm births, yet a number of much smaller rural regions also revealed high levels of start-ups. Knowledge spillovers from universities and firm R&D strongly affect the start-up rates for both knowledge intensive manufacturing and knowledge intensive services firms. However, the start-up rate of knowledge-intensive service firms is tied more strongly to the supply of highly educated individuals and the political regulatory regime within the municipality. This suggests that knowledge intensive service-start-ups are more susceptible to both demand-side and supply-side context than manufacturing start-ups. Our study contributes to the growing stream of research that explains entrepreneurial activity as shaped by contextual factors, most notably educational institutions that contribute to technology startups.