This book is about the role of knowledge spillovers and strategic entrepreneurship in the management context. It focuses on how knowledge spillovers and strategic entrepreneurship are crucial to the process of creative destruction and construction. The book aims to provide insights into and discussion on how firms combine entrepreneurial action that creates new opportunities for industries, regions and economies. This book is first of its kind to link knowledge management perspectives to strategic entrepreneurship to understand the co-creation process. Being interdisciplinary in nature, this book appeals to entrepreneurship and knowledge management scholars, students and practitioners.

By serving as a conduit for knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurship is the missing link between investments in new knowledge and economic growth. The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship provides not just an explanation of why entrepreneurship has become more prevalent as the factor of knowledge has emerged as a crucial source for comparative advantage, but also why entrepreneurship plays a vital role in generating economic growth. Entrepreneurship is an important mechanism permeating the knowledge filter to facilitate the spill over of knowledge and ultimately generate economic growth.

With this selection of previously published articles, Professor Acs provides a guided tour to the leading ideas in knowledge spillover theory.

This brief presents a detailed look at the entrepreneurial ecosystem of nations around the world by combining individual data with institutional components. Presenting data from the 2018 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), which measures the quality and scale of entrepreneurial process from 137 countries world-wide, this book provides a rich understanding of entrepreneurship and a more precise means to measure it. The novelty of the GEDI 2018 edition is the examination of the connection between the GEDI score and the computed total factor productivity (TFP) values. The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index is an annual index (composite indicator) that measures the health of the entrepreneurship ecosystems in a given country. The authors have identified 14 components (or pillars) that are important for the health of entrepreneurial ecosystems, identified data to capture each , and used this data to calculate three levels of scores for a given country: the overall GEDI score, scores for Individuals and Institutions, and pillar level scores (which measure the quality of each of the 14 components).

The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The fastest-growing regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors.