engleski

What differentiates innovative from non-innovative early stage entrepreneurs?

Innovativeness of enterprises is an increasingly interesting topic not just due to the accelerating development of technologies but also because the innovativeness is one of the key factor for enterprise growth. There are many studies that investigate innovativeness. However, there is a lack of research that investigate early stage innovative entrepreneurs. The main goal of our research is to find out what differentiates innovative from non-innovative early stage entrepreneurs. We intend to investigate important characteristics – those which increase probability of having innovative enterprise and those which reduce the probability for innovativeness among variables that represents entrepreneurs’ characteristics. Our data set is gathered through GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) research for Croatia over the period 2009 to 2017. Total number of entrepreneurially active people in our sample is 1386. Among them there are 12.75% who are categorized as innovative. In data analysis we used chi-square test of independence, t-test and logistic regression. Statistical software R was used for data analysis. Our findings show that innovative entrepreneurs are younger in average and more educated. Among enterprises’ characteristics, export activities and expected number of employees in 5 years have been found as significant. Innovative entrepreneurs are better in networking, they see more opportunities, they have less fear of failure, and have higher intentions in starting a new venture in the future. In addition, motivation for starting a business is different between these two groups of entrepreneurs. Our research has confirmed that there are significant differences between innovative and non- innovative entrepreneurs. This paper can be a good example for other counties included in the GEM research to analyze their data on the same way in order to identify factors important for innovativeness specific for their counties.

innovative entrepreneurs, non-innovative entrepreneurs, early stage entrepreneurship, GEM research, logistic regression model

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