Immigrant innovative activity among entrepreneurial firms: a study of European firms
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Samar A. Alwehaibi (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Albert Link
Abstract: This dissertation investigates the commercialization efforts of immigrant-founded knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship (KIE) firms in Europe. Founders of KIE firms have a higher receptiveness to technological opportunities and the exploitation of such opportunities into commercialization than founders of other types of firms. It is well established that expansion in economically useful commercialization is associated with economic growth, where the entrepreneur is the key economic agent that successfully turns inventions into commercial products or processes. Some of the existing literature that studies immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States has found that immigrant-founded firms have a higher probability of commercialization in the high-technology sector than native-founded firms. However, there is not a sufficient evidence of this relationship in European countries. To examine this relationship, I use a dataset derived from the European Commission-funded framework project (FP7) advancing knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship and innovation for growth and social well-being in Europe (AEGIS). This project aimed to explore and observe knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship (KIE) recurrently in different sectors and regions. I find a negative association between immigrant-founded firms and commercialization in the high-technology sector. The resulting negative association suggests that high-tech immigrant-founded firms in European countries are at a commercialization disadvantage than high-tech immigrant-founded firms in the United States. This disadvantage could be due to differences in the unobserved entrepreneurship abilities among immigrant founders between the United States and some European countries. Also, in the analysis of sub-sample of countries, immigrant-founded firms are less innovative than native-founded firms in the group of (Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, and Portugal) in the AEGIS database. This result might indicate that this group of countries differs from other European countries in size and socioeconomic model. Also, less innovative countries might have other attributes that might not attract more talented immigrant entrepreneurs compared to natives.
Immigrant innovative activity among entrepreneurial firms: a study of European firms
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Created on 8/1/2021
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Dissertation
- Language: English
- Date: 2021
- Keywords
- Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Europe, Immigrant, Innovation, KIE
- Subjects
- Immigrant business enterprises $z Europe
- Entrepreneurship $z Europe