| dc.description.abstract | This thesis sets out to study the influence of institutional diversity at the national level as an explanation of a start-up’s innovativeness by conducting a transnational comparison of 940 start-ups. As the complexity of the various current sustainability challenges requires novel systemic approaches, innovation will play a key role in tackling issues such as climate change and a growing human population. Start-ups can provide radical technological (niche) innovations which can lead to a change in the current system. The literature on entrepreneurship and venture creation highlights differences in the degree of start-up innovativeness, but has not yet systematically investigated the reasons for this distinction. This is, however, problematic because we need a methodical understanding of the drivers of innovativeness to thoroughly understand what motivates entrepreneurs to develop different types of new products or services within the framework of new start-ups. Such knowledge is particularly important for policy-makers to effectively target their support policies towards the drivers of (different types of) start-up innovation. The important role of national institutions as a determinant for innovativeness has been defined for incumbent firms by the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) literature. According to the VoC findings of Hall and Soskice (2001) liberal market economies (LMEs) like the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) tend to have more radical technological innovations than coordinated market economies (CMEs) like Germany and the Netherlands. By assessing the degree of innovativeness of several hundred start-ups in these countries, this assumption is tested quantitatively with linear, ordinal and multinomial logistic regression. Besides testing the hypothesis that start-ups located in LMEs have a higher, i.e. more radical, degree of innovativeness, the influence of other contextual and start-up specific factors (e.g. industry and product-relatedness to sustainability) on its degree of innovativeness are analysed. The results indicate that the VoC findings also apply to start-ups, as ventures in LMEs are more likely to be radically innovative than start-ups in CMEs. However, national institutions do not explain the whole variance of start-up innovativeness. Other factors like industry sector and knowledge-intensity, type of good and product-relatedness to sustainability, as well as the amount of total funding significantly impact the type of innovation of start-ups. | |
