ABSTRACT
This paper assesses the financing gap faced by innovative start-ups in the European Union (EU) when they reach the scaling-up stage of their development. It draws on data collected through a seminar involving 117 experts representing start-ups and scale-ups, financial actors, academia, and EU policymakers and aimed at investigating the causes, consequences, and policy solutions of the scale-up gap in the EU. Besides highlighting supply-side deficiencies, the seminar also emphasised weaknesses in both the demand side of the scale-up gap and the EU ecosystem for high-growth entrepreneurship. The paper offers policy recommendations, highlighting the need for policy solutions involving private actors and specifically targeting scale-ups. The paper also calls for more robust research on measuring the scale-up financing gap and its economic impact to improve the policy response.
ABSTRACT
This paper contributes to studies on dynamic capabilities (DCs) by showing that a neglected environmental contingency - i.e. the occurrence of a jolt - shapes the DCs-performance relationship. We focus on high-tech entrepreneurial ventures because these are the firms that jolts affect most; in so doing, we also advance the understanding of DCs in the entrepreneurship field. We argue that, in the aftermath of an environmental jolt, the high-tech entrepreneurial ventures that use internationalization and new product development capabilities to modify their resource configuration and regain environmental fit enjoy better performance. Econometric estimates on a sample of 340 Italian high-tech entrepreneurial ventures confronting the consequences of the global economic crisis that began in 2008 confirm that separately using these two DCs has a positive performance effect. This effect is stronger for relatively smaller ventures. Interestingly, despite synergies should arise from the combined use of the two DCs, we do not detect any superadditive effects.
