Contenu du sommaire : Innovative Entrepreneurship

Is the entrepreneur an innovator or simply an economic agent who creates his own job? The response varies according to the historical context. In a context of economic growth, the entrepreneur is for the majority of economists an innovator but in periods of crisis, he is no more a hero. The aim of this paper is not to present an exhaustive analysis of the economic theories of the entrepreneur but, by revisiting the works of a few key economists, to study the evolution of the role of the entrepreneur in the capitalist society. In the history of economic thought, economists have defined the entrepreneur as the economic agent who achieves new combinations of production factors. Thus, he is defined by the innovative action. This entrepreneur is useful to explain phenomena such as economic growth, crisis and technical progress. But in the today's managerial economy, the entrepreneur has a more pragmatic role, he becomes the saver of capitalism through job creation. In the first part of this article, we present some key approaches of the heroic entrepreneur. In the second part, we point out the place of the entrepreneur in a complex capitalist economy dominated by the state regulatory intervention and the big firms' expansion strategies.

Innovation economics is poorly defined due to a plethora of meanings to innovation, and each having a distinctive diverse connection to economic analysis. This crucial aspect of economic development is only weakly integrated into the main body of economics. An excursion through the history of economic thought is conducted in order to find the innovative entrepreneur. This starts with early political economy and on to the cul-de-sac of neoclassical economics and then the early 20th Century dynamic paths for innovation of Joseph Schumpeter (from supply-side) and Michał Kalecki (from demand-side). The tour ends with the innovation systems work of a diverse set of modern heterodox economists. There is a lack of coherence on what innovation economics is, and the role of the innovative entrepreneur as the change agent tends to fade in the background of these complex innovation systems. A research strategy to overcome this problem ends the paper.

The purpose of the paper is to appraise the impact of Marshall's ideas on today's analysis of localized industrial activities, with a special focus on his vision of the entrepreneur's action on the emergence of local industrial atmosphere. The first section uses Marshall's approach to industrial dynamics. This approach articulates knowledge and organization and the role of local actors in the structuring of industrial districts leading to the rise of some peculiar atmospheres. Section two examines the use of Marshall's ideas in the modern literature on Italian industrial districts and business localization. The third section focuses on the impact of entrepreneurial activities and innovation in the building up of industrial atmosphere. The fourth section concludes.

The aim of this article is to draw some lines about the application of proximity analysis in business relations, be there face to face exchanges or distant relations, with a peculiar attention to innovative behaviors, whether they imply local interactions, virtual exchanges or mobility of white collars and engineers. We first give a broad definition of various types of proximity relations, especially the most important ones: geographical proximity, organized proximity, and temporary geographical proximity, and then provide some developments about the theoretical origins and the development of the proximity analysis. The third part of the paper is devoted to a summary of the main applied studies and to the design of a core model of proximity relations for business firms, involving different types of proximity links, be there local or abroad. We then apply this model to the analysis of the local and external relations of the firms in the optics cluster in the greater Paris Region, and identify four types of firms and their proximity figures.

The words – “strategic”, “scanning” – have to be redefined when applied to small business firms. Indeed, the specific nature of the entrepreneurial firms requires challenging managerial definitions of SME. That specificity is primarily due to the central role of the entrepreneur. Thus, researchers on the small entrepreneur must refer to pragmatic topics. Scanning practices are based on percepts, inside and outside the firm. They comprise a large span of environmental data, always evolving and changing with the time. Pragmatic links between percepts and concepts are achieved by the way of typologies and systemic grids. Several examples, with actual cases, set out, firstly, the use of entrepreneurial typologies related to scanning practices, and, secondly, one systemic grid to appraise environmental risks on markets (dependency and vulnerability).

In this paper, we examine the nature of innovation within small firms across two OECD countries with a particular focus on the differences between firms with low R&D intensity and those with high R&D intensity. Drawing on a sample of small to medium enterprises (SME) who were engaged in the commercialization of at least one innovation, the study finds that there are differences between the needs of high and low to mid-tech firms in terms of type of innovation produced and in terms of formalization of the innovation process. The study also suggests that low to mid tech small firms innovate and need to be supported, but that governments generally speaking put the emphasis on more visible but less numerous high tech firms.

Social entrepreneurship is commonly used to qualify economic initiatives that serve social and/or environmental mission and that reinvest a large part of their surpluses in support of their mission. Even though this definition is not yet stabilized and its boundaries remain unclear, it aims to achieve both economic efficiency and social purpose. It takes place within a context of need to build new responses to societal challenges that are sustainable, socially, economically and environmentally. Although interest in social entrepreneurship is growing, it is still a controversial notion. Based on a literature survey, this paper identifies the major elements of controversy. Current debates concern the organizational forms taken by social entrepreneurship, that will be determining, among others, for the governance structure of social enterprises. Another central debate focuses on the boundaries of this notion, between market, public policy and civil society.

Diversity is increasingly considered as a motive for entrepreneurship. In our article, we set the hypothesis that diversity positively affects self-employment. In order to validate our hypothesis, we discuss two literature reviews: the first one about the link between culture, ethnicity and entrepreneurship and the other one about gender and entrepreneurship. We also discuss the last study led by OECD (2012) on gender entrepreneurship. Our article reveals that culture and ethnicity may be considered as core factors which affect entrepreneurship in general and gender entrepreneurship more specifically, but other factors may also affect self-employment such as: the existence of social networks, labor and capital condition, gender and age, racial background and contingencies factors such as institutional environment, geographic context, etc. As a consequence, our hypothesis is only partially validated.