Abstract
Despite the widely acknowledged role of start-ups in economic development, we still know little about their innovative activities compared with those of established firms. Drawing upon a large sample of UK firms, this paper uses a matching estimator approach to explore the disparity between start-ups and established firms in terms of their innovative performance. The paper demonstrates that start-ups do differ significantly from established firms in their innovation activities. We find that being a new firm increases the likelihood of innovating in terms of new products and organizational arrangements, whereas start-ups are no more likely than established firms to introduce new processes. We explore the implications of these findings for theory and future research.
| Original language | English |
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| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2008 |
| Event | 68th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, AOM 2008 - Anaheim, CA, USA United States Duration: 8 Aug 2008 → 13 Aug 2008 |
Conference
| Conference | 68th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, AOM 2008 |
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| Country/Territory | USA United States |
| City | Anaheim, CA |
| Period | 8/08/08 → 13/08/08 |
Funding
An earlier version of the paper was published in the Best Paper Proceedings of the 2008 Academy of Management Conference. We would like to thank seminar participants at London Business School and the University of Nottingham and conference participants at the 2008 Academy of Management Meeting, BIS Innovation Economics conference, DRUID Conference, and EMAEE. We are grateful for comments received from Zoltan Acs, Dirk Czarnitzi, Jim Combs, Bernd Ebersberger, Sourafel Girma, Michael Jacobides, Jonathan Haskel, Orietta Marsili, Alessandro Nuvolari, Andreas Pyka, Toke Reichstein, Paul Stoneman, Edward Zajac and the anonymous reviewers. We are grateful to the UK's Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills for sponsoring the origins of this research and to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's IMRC at Imperial College London for financial support. Ammon Salter would like to acknowledge the financial support of the UK Innovation Research Centre, which is funded by the ESRC , NESTA , BIS and TSB .
Keywords
- Entrepreneurship
- Innovation
- Start-ups
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Management Information Systems
- Management of Technology and Innovation
