Latest revision as of 15:51, 31 May 2024

EIX 6. SISTEMA DE CIÈNCIA I INNOVACIÓ I EL REPTE DE LA TRANSFORMACIÓ DIGITAL

Mercedes Teruel, Agustí Segarra-Blasco and Josep Tomàs-Porres

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

On December 2021, the European Commission presented the 2021 Social Economy Action Plan. The plan aims to promote the social economy by generating the regulatory framework, visualising the potential, and opening new opportunities in order that social economy organisation start up and scale up.¹ The emergence and evolution of start-ups is related to their locational context through different linkages such as the labour market, capital market and knowledge market. From an evolutionary approach, this ecosystem evolves thanks to individual and collective learning resulting in innovation (Acs et al., 2017).

Despite a wide number of theoretical and empirical works about the entrepreneurial ecosystems and the emergence of start-ups (for instance, Acs et al., 2017; Stam and Van de Ven, 2021; Audretsch et al., 2023), there is a lack of empirical evidence on the relationship between the existing social challenges in a location such as climate change or ageing and the emergence of start-ups providing innovations to this social need. The evidence already points out the interconnection between local actors and the development of start-ups. For the case of sustainable start-ups, Chaudhary et al. (2024) present a systematic literature. However, there are questions that remain unknown. What role the social needs from a location play in facilitating the emergence of start-ups? Do locations with different social challenges generate start-ups with different entrepreneurial purposes?

Our main database belongs to the public directory Barcelona & Catalonia Startups Hub created at the end of 2016 by the Catalan agency for business competitiveness ACCIÓ (L'Agència per la Competitivitat de l'Empresa). This database is composed of more than 2,000 start-ups from all of Catalonia and provides firm-level information including address, year of creation, industry, technology, business model, and target. Our database was obtained in March 2023 and was composed of 2,036 start-ups.

Sustainability startups comprise 24% of the enterprises in our sample, the majority of these startups are located in the province of Barcelona. The share of start-ups that are devoting effort to CE differs between provinces. This is a first

References

Acs, Z. J., Stam, E., Audretsch, D. B., & O’Connor, A. (2017). The lineages of the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach. Small Business Economics, 49, 1-10.

Audretsch, D. B., Belitski, M., Caiazza, R., & Siegel, D. (2023). Effects of open innovation in startups: Theory and evidence. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 194, 122694.

Chaudhary, S., Kaur, P., Ferraris, A., Bresciani, S., & Dhir, A. (2024). Connecting entrepreneurial ecosystem and innovation. Grasping at straws or hitting a home run?. Technovation, 130, 102942.

Stam, E., & Van de Ven, A. (2021). Entrepreneurial ecosystem elements. Small Business Economics, 56(2), 809-832.

(¹) https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_6568