Superentrepreneurship and Global Imbalances: Closing Europe’s Gap to Other Industrialized Regions

Entrepreneurs perform a central function in today’s decentralized market economies by innovating and exploring new ways to organize factors of production. They are consequently widely believed to play an important role in economic growth. The attention afforded to entrepreneurship by policy-makers and academics is also rooted in historical experience, as each wave of innovation since the eve of industrialization has been associated with entrepreneurs such as James Watt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Sam Walton and Bill Gates. Entrepreneurs have more recently been linked to firm performance using careful causal methods (Becker and Hvide, 2013). Entrepreneurship theory is concerned with understanding the innovative process and with identifying policies that foster the creation of rapidly growing firms (Baumol, 2002). The dominant view of entrepreneurship in the literature is arguably the Schumpeterian definition of the entrepreneur as an innovator and as a driver of growth (Hébert and Link, 2006; Henrekson and Roine, 2007).