Innovation modes and entrepreneurial behavioral characteristics in regional growth

This paper studies the relationship between entrepreneurship and regional growth by arguing that the entrepreneurship/growth relationship is mediated by the characteristics of the innovative environment in which new firms operate, which can explain the high volatility of the empirical results on the entrepreneurship/regional growth nexus existing in the literature. The innovation context represents the pool of discovery opportunities and of creative atmosphere that may explain the birth of an entrepreneurial activity. Moreover, these opportunities may or may not be grasped according to behavioral characteristics of regional entrepreneurs, interpreted as potential capacity to discover, risk orientation and strategic vision. We provide evidence of the complex and spatially heterogeneous interplay between regional innovation modes, entrepreneurial behavioral characteristics and economic growth for 252 NUTS2 regions of the European Union.