Abstract
Excerpt: Entrepreneurial activity requires innovation when entrepreneurs move from initial disequilibrium towards equilibrium (Kirzner Citation1973; Schumpeter Citation1954). Public administration and government policies should support both entrepreneurship and innovation as such a support is necessary for organizations as they design programmes and develop policies for growth and sustainability (Galbraith et al. Citation2017). New ventures need talent, good ideas and a knowledge-based economy around them to positively impact regional development. Organizations tend to access knowledge from research sources, implicitly assuming that entrepreneurship and innovation involve developing social networks and collective actions. The discussion concerning the space and scale of knowledge networks for innovation is important to clarify. Additionally, emerging entrepreneurial firms are highly active with regard to accessing knowledge from a range of sources and geographic locations; however, these networking activities may decrease during future periods of peak firm growth (Huggings et al. Citation2015). The interplay between the interests of research centres such as universities and local high-tech economies is associated with broader technological trends and with the capacity of these universities to draw on national funding programmes (Smith and Bagchi-Sen Citation2012). Furthermore, a source of growth and competitiveness can be found in the innovative interplay among local actors and institutions as the region serves as an ‘incubator’ for small and medium-sized organizations. The result of these kinds of processes, however, can be considerable regional determinism. Global networks or distant knowledge sources seem to be particularly beneficial to innovation, so organizations should participate in knowledge networks at all spatial levels. The role of the virtual space, both as an interaction space and as a complementary dimension, makes it possible to gain new insights into knowledge formation in a digital world (Aslesen, Martin, and Sardo Citation2018).