Elsevier

Journal of Business Research

Volume 115, July 2020, Pages 475-485
Journal of Business Research

Innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge in the business scientific field: Mapping the research front

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.11.045Get rights and content

Abstract

Innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge have been acknowledged as the basis of economic competiveness and growth, with recent research pointing out the powerful impact of their joint consideration. Specific literature has emerged in the last years suggesting that the three concepts constitute a promising new scholarly discipline. Nevertheless, previous bibliometric studies have highlighted that these three research fields are still mainly developing in a separate manner. The aim of this study is to analyze the current research front at the intersection of the three concepts in business research, through a bibliometric study based on performance metrics, bibliographic coupling and word co-occurrence analysis. This study aims to provide researchers, firms, and policy-makers with a valuable source of knowledge that allows them to define research lines, business strategies and policy measures. Innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge studies in the business area configure a promising research field at an early stage of development.

Introduction

Innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge (IEK) are core concepts intrinsically related to multiple research areas (Bhupatiraju et al., 2012, Carlsson et al., 2013). Although research on these concepts was mainly originated in scientific fields which differ from business and management (economics, psychology or technical fields), specific business and management research areas have gained prominence in last decades (Fagerberg et al., 2012, Landström et al., 2012, Martin et al., 2012). However, they have been developed as separate concepts and have only been shyly treated in an integrative fashion, contributing to the formation of a new research field. Fagerberg et al., 2012, Bhupatiraju et al., 2012 point to this conclusion, although referring to entrepreneurship, innovation and science and technology studies. As far as science and technology studies are mainly concerned with the production and development of scientific and technological knowledge, we assume this conclusion as a starting point to define our research aim. Similar conclusions about the relative independence of the fields and the lack of a clear integration have been reached when analyzing either the interrelation between innovation and entrepreneurship (Block et al., 2017, Landström et al., 2012, Landström et al., 2015, Ribeiro-Soriano and Huarng, 2013, Schmitz et al., 2017) or between knowledge and innovation (Powell, Kouropalatis, Morgan, & Karhu, 2016).

In our knowledge-based society, the intersection and interactions between the three concepts are increasingly considered as a critical point for economic growth (Braunerhjelm, Acs, Audretsch, & Carlsson, 2010). The connections with economic growth have also been acknowledged independently for innovation (Crossan & Apaydin, 2010), knowledge (Audretsch & Link, 2018) and entrepreneurship (Galindo-Martín, Méndez-Picazo, & Castaño-Martínez, 2016), as well as for the joint consideration of entrepreneurship and knowledge (Agarwal, Audretsch, & Sarkar, 2007), entrepreneurship and innovation (Crossan and Apaydin, 2010, Secundo et al., 2015) or knowledge and innovation (Powell et al., 2016). Furthermore, in recent years many authors have pointed out that the promotion of knowledge, entrepreneurship or innovation in isolation does not automatically improve economic growth (Block et al., 2017, Ghio et al., 2015, Huggins and Thompson, 2015).

In this context, the analysis of the interactions, complementarities and reinforcing links among IEK acquires special interest, particularly for the business research area. The role of IEK in relation to both the creation of new successful and sustainable business and the improvement of the competitiveness of existing ones has received increased attention among academics and practitioners in last decades. The concept of knowledge-intensive innovative entrepreneurship (KIE) (Malerba and McKelvey, 2018, Malerba and McKelvey, 2019) is probably the most recent manifestation of how the three concepts can be merged into a new one that concentrates new research developments and contributions. Malerba and McKelvey (2018) present KIE as “the most important type of entrepreneurship in the modern knowledge economy”. Other important contribution is Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff’s “triple helix” (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000). This focuses on how University–Industry–Government interactions are key for innovation and entrepreneurship and, ultimately, for knowledge-based economic growth and social development. Also of paramount importance is the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE) (Acs et al., 2009, Agarwal et al., 2007), which evidences the role of entrepreneurship in the process of transforming knowledge into innovation. Furthermore, as evidence of the growing interest that IEK is raising, specialized journals, conferences and associations are emerging focused on the interactions between the three concepts, a signal of the advances towards its establishment as a meaningful scholarly discipline (Bhupatiraju et al., 2012, Fagerberg and Verspagen, 2009, Fagerberg et al., 2012).

This paper aims to explore how the three IEK concepts are being jointly considered or developed in recent academic contributions in the business research area. Since some years have passed from Fagerberg et al.’s special issue on the evolution and interrelations between the three research fields (considering science and technology studies as equivalent to knowledge), it is expected to verify through a bibliometric analysis whether in the last five years (2015–2019) a stronger integration can be confirmed or not. This will also allow us to identify the particular features of the current research front of IEK studies, showing the most relevant journals, papers and authors along with the most relevant connections between them. The analysis will be mainly focused on defining and explaining the current research front through bibliographic coupling (Kessler, 1963) and co-occurrence of words (Callon, Courtial, Turner, & Bauin, 1983).

So this study applies bibliometric methods to analyze the state-off-the-art of IEK research in the last five years in order to contribute to a better understanding of its recent development and determine whether IEK are still today developing as three different research fields. More concretely we set the following objectives:

  • 1.

    to define the current research front at the IEK intersection, identifying the most relevant authors, articles and journals from 2015 onwards and the most frequent keywords.

  • 2.

    to map the connections or links among the different elements of the research front.

  • 3.

    to identify the main topics or themes underlying the IEK research front.

  • 4.

    to analyze the extent of independence or interdependence among the IEK concepts.

Bibliometric studies are based on the statistical analysis of academic publications (Pritchard, 1969) to obtain a general overview of a specific research field in an objective and unbiased fashion (Zupic & Čater, 2015). Bibliometric analysis has been extensively applied to the analysis of specific research fields such as innovation (Fagerberg et al., 2012) or entrepreneurship (Ferreira et al., 2019, Gartner et al., 2006), and, in the same way, to the intersection of innovation and knowledge (Powell et al., 2016). It has also been applied to specific IEK subareas, including the KSTE (Ghio et al., 2015), social entrepreneurship (Rey-Martí, Ribeiro-Soriano, & Palacios-Marqués, 2016), international entrepreneurship (Baier-Fuentes, Merigó, Amorós, & Gaviria-Marín, 2019), knowledge management (Gaviria-Marin, Merigó, & Baier-Fuentes, 2019) or innovation systems and ecosystems (Arho, 2019) among others.

Assuming that for advancing a particular research stream it is necessary to make a synthesis of the previous research findings (Zupic & Čater, 2015), we believe that this bibliometric study focused on recent publications between 2015 and 2019 contributes to create a complete picture of how IEK are being currently integrated in business research. To our knowledge no other bibliometric study has been carried out to date with these two distinctive features: the consideration of this rather recent time-frame of the last five years and the specific analysis of the intersection of the innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge concepts in business research. Valuable information would be provided to researchers interested in knowing the current status of this potentially new research field. Conclusions would also be useful for policy-makers aiming at identifying key factors to consider when designing effective measures to support economic growth. Finally, practitioners searching into the academic literature for new developments that can help them to improve firm performance and competitiveness are also targeted.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: the next section develops a literature review on the IEK concepts both separately and jointly considered. Then we describe the main methodological issues of the study. The results of the different analyses are presented in the fourth section. Finally, we elaborate on the main conclusions, implications and limitations of the study.

Section snippets

Literature review

Entrepreneurship studies are the youngest ones (Bhupatiraju et al., 2012, Markin et al., 2017) and they are concerned with the subject, the process and the effects of the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities which lead to business creation and growth (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Innovation studies are rooted according to Schumpeter‘s view of innovation as a dynamic force that motivates the development, adoption and exploitation of value-added activities able to transform

Method

This section firstly explains how we have searched for the scientific documents that configure the research front in the business research area at the IEK intersection from 2015 onwards. Then we present the basics of the bibliometric techniques applied to the analysis of this research front.

Results and discussion

At this section, the main results from our analysis on recent IEK studies in the business research area are shown, in order to map the research front through bibliographic coupling and words co-occurrence. Nevertheless, it is firstly provided a brief description of the main features of the research front through a performance analysis of the main references and sources in our data set.

Conclusions, limitations and research implications and opportunities

Over a bibliographic database capturing WoS indexed articles at the IEK intersection in the business research area from 2015 onwards, different bibliometric techniques following different objectives have been applied: the analysis of performance metrics, bibliographic coupling and words co-occurrence to structure the knowledge front, network mapping to visualize the interrelations among articles, authors and sources and clustering to identify general themes or topics. Fulfilling these three

Juan Piñeiro-Chousa is a Professor with Tenure at Accounting and Finance Department – Santiago de Compostela University (Spain). His research topics are focused on corporate social responsibility, reputational risk, and behavioral finance.

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  • Cited by (0)

    Juan Piñeiro-Chousa is a Professor with Tenure at Accounting and Finance Department – Santiago de Compostela University (Spain). His research topics are focused on corporate social responsibility, reputational risk, and behavioral finance.

    M. Ángeles López-Cabarcos is a Professor with Tenure at Business Administration Department - Santiago de Compostela University (Spain). She is also a teacher of Universitát Oberta de Catalunya (Spain) and A Coruña University (Spain). Her research topics are focused on innovation and firm strategy, knowledge management, human resources management, and behavioral finance.

    Noelia María Romero-Castro is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her research is focused on the financial analysis of entrepreneurial, innovative and socially responsible initiatives.

    Ada María Pérez-Pico is an Assistant Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Her research is focused on behavioral finance and investment analysis.

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