Knowledge, Entrepreneurship and Performance: Evidence from country-level and firm-level studies
On Thursday, September 9, 2010, Haibo Zhou defended her PhD thesis entitled Knowledge, Entrepreneurship and Performance, Evidence from Country-level and Firm-level Studies. Supervisors were Professor Roy Thurik and Professor Lorraine Uhlaner.
About Haibo Zhou
Haibo Zhou (1977) was born in Shanghai, China. She obtained her Bachelor of Engineering degree from Shanghai University of Engineering Science in 1999 with a major in Automobile Engineering. After having worked as a consultant in automobile industry in China for four years, she came to the Netherlands in 2003 and joined the Master program in Management of Technology at Delft University of Technology. In 2005, she successfully obtained her Master of Science degree.
In 2006, she joined the department of Applied Economics at the Erasmus School of Economics as a PhD candidate, working together with Prof. Roy Thurik. Her PhD research focused on the interrelations between knowledge and entrepreneurship, and their effects on economic performance. She took both economic and managerial perspectives for her research, conducted empirical studies at different level of analysis using various econometric and statistical techniques.
Her work was nominated top 5 finalists of Best Conference Paper for Practical Implication in the SMS 2008, and she was awarded Hauffman scholarship for Entrepreneurship Doctoral Consortium in the AOM 2008. At present, Haibo Zhou works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Innovation Management and Strategy at University of Groningen.
About the dissertation
This book investigates the interrelations between knowledge and entrepreneurship, and their consequences with regard to economic performance. Both knowledge and entrepreneurship are recognized as new twin driving forces for economic growth. Recent studies suggest that neither knowledge nor entrepreneurship alone is sufficient to drive growth. Investing in new knowledge is only a necessary condition; new knowledge needs to be exploited and put into commercial use such that it can lead to higher levels of competitiveness and economic growth. Entrepreneurship is acknowledged to play an important role in this process. It is thus essential for economists and policy-makers to understand how knowledge and entrepreneurship relate to each other and why they lead to economic growth.
The five empirical chapters included in this book provide new insights into aforementioned issues on the firm- and country-level. Chapter 2 is based on a country-level analysis and identifies the moderating role of entrepreneurship in turning knowledge into innovation, which may ultimately lead to economic growth. Chapters 3 through 5, taking a firm-level perspective, investigate how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) manage their knowledge assets (including organization knowledge and human resources) to stimulate innovation performance. Chapter 6 pays special attention to the determinants of SME growth. The findings of the chapters indicate that entrepreneurship catalyzes the transformation of new knowledge into innovation on the one hand; and the other hand, knowledge plays a significant role in stimulating innovation performance and SME growth.
