Innovation-driven entrepreneurship in developing economies

The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship (KSTE) has recently emerged as an influential research stream that examines the origin, development and economic impact of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. While empirical evidence has shown that the main premise of the KSTE generally holds in most advanced economies, the purpose of the present study is to investigate the extent to which the ideas advocated by the KSTE are generalizable to different contexts in developing countries. On applying a logistic multilevel analysis to a sample of almost 250,000 individuals across 45 developing countries, the results show that the different context found in developing economies produces a limited connection between knowledge spillovers, innovation and entrepreneurship in comparison with the conventional linkage studied in the KSTE literature.