Recent Developments in the Study of Entrepreneurship and Territorial Economic Performance

• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2049
• Author: Yancy Vaillant,Esteban Lafuente

GUEST EDITORIAL

Strat. Change 25: 99–103 (2016)

Published online in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2049

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Strategic Change: Briengs in Entrepreneurial Finance

Strategic Change

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2049

Recent Developments in the Study of

Entrepreneurship and Territorial Economic

Performance1

Esteban Lafuente

Department of Management, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona Tech),

Barcelona,Spain

Yancy Vaillant

ESC Rennes School of Business, Rennes, France

The complexity of the entrepreneurial process calls for further research to

disentangle its different impacts over the economic performance of territories.

Over the last decades, the pressures and demands of dierent stakeholders have

led public administrations to turn their attention and eorts to the development

of policies aimed at promoting entrepreneurship as a way to enhance territorial

performance, and to alleviate the increased unemployment rates during recent

periods of economic downturn in many countries. Yet, scholars have recently

started to adopt policy approaches whereby entrepreneurship is dened as a

multidimensional and complex construct (Acs et al., 2014). Rather, to merely

create jobs in the short term, entrepreneurship as a policy mechanism has proved

its eectiveness when used to channel individuals’ eorts and investments toward

the development of entrepreneurial activities with long‐term expected returns that

serve to revitalize economic activity.

Regardless of whether entrepreneurship is given a behavioral denition, where

entrepreneurial activity is linked to innovativeness, or whether it adopts a more

restrictive operational denition focused on the start‐up event, the study of entre-

preneurship has been attracting ever‐growing attention as an academic discipline in

its own right. With this rise in importance, the study of entrepreneurship is becom-

ing more sophisticated and is gaining in complexity. e unit of analysis within

entrepreneurship research now varies from the entrepreneurial venture, to the indi-

vidual entrepreneur promoting this venture, to his/her team, as well as the com-

munities and/or economies which incubate them. Entrepreneurship is no longer

viewed as a one‐o event, but rather as a process of many stages from intention, to

1 JEL classication code: L26.

Entrepreneurship is a

multidimensional and complex

construct.

The analysis of the interlock

between entrepreneurship and

territorial performance is of great

relevance for policy makers.

Effective policy should promote

the channeling of individual

efforts and investments toward

the development of

entrepreneurial activities with

long‐term expected returns that

serve to fuel economic activity.