Entrepreneurship, Human Capital, and Regional Development: Labour Networks, Knowledge Flows, and Industry Growth

摘要

The governments of many countries are concerned with enhancing the level of entrepreneurship, and special programmes are developed to support entrepreneurship. Much attention is paid to enhancing the level of general and specific human capital, since it is believed to influence entrepreneurial capabilites (Martin et al., 2013). The concept of human capital was introduced by Becker more than 50 years ago in 1962. However, it is still a popular research topic and attracts the attention of entrepreneurship scholars (Westhead and Solesvik, in press). There are three main antecedents of human capital: education, training, and experience (Becker, 1962; Baptista and Leitao, 2015). An individual's human capital can shape productivity (Becker, 1975) and entrepreneurial behaviour (Westhead et al., 2011). Human capital theory is widely used to explain the propensity of individuals to become successful entrepreneurs. General human capital relates to a person's age, gender, ethnic background, social class, education, etc. Specific human capital relating to management and industry know-how, technical and entrepreneurial assets, ability to acquire resources, and prior business ownership experience is generally associated with better entrepreneur performance than general human capital variables (Unger et al., 2011).