4-Helix Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Applied to KIBS: A Development Strategy for MSMEs

Introduction

The importance of services in the world is outstanding, especially in developed countries, where services account up to 90 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Even in African developing countries, services contributed 47% of growth in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 2000-2005, while industry contributed 37% and agriculture only 16%. Recent growth in Africa is due to services as much as natural resources or textiles, even in countries benefiting from trade preferences in these products (OECD, 2008).

In developed countries, and as a consequence from business globalization, nations compete with new Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) that are influenced by their innovation (Miles, Belousova, & Chichkanov, 2019), entrepreneurial ecosystems, local manufacturing (Wyrwich, 2018), business specialization, the size of new manufacturers, and local manufacturing (Horváth, & Rabetino, 2019). KIBS are defined as organizations or private companies that frequently use professional knowledge, whether related to a specific (technical) discipline or a (technical) domain, generating intermediary knowledge businesses (products or services) (Figueiredo et al., 2017; Hertog, 2000). Entrepreneurial ecosystems defined by the interaction of specialized and highly-skilled intellectual capital, formed by the union of human capital, structural capital, and relational capital, so firms compete in globalized and multicultural markets defined by their efficiency and the necessity of achieving good price-quality relationship for firms to survive in hostile environments.

As with Colombo et al. (2019), 4-helix entrepreneurial ecosystems involve a highly interactive network of individuals and organizations by linking financial intermediaries, universities and research institutions, suppliers and customers, multinational companies, or even governments. At this respect, Behera, Dash, and Mohanty (2018) affirm that the entrepreneurial ecosystem in some developing countries (e.g., India) is an amalgamation of industry and academia, as cultural support and education in developing countries is vital for startups to survive.

GDP growth is increasingly linked to the services sector, especially in developed countries endowed with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. New venture creation is determined to the complexity of the creation process itself (‘projectification’) and how startups collaborate (‘partnering’) (Li et al., 2019). For this reason, those countries whose entrepreneurial ecosystems are closed and do not collaborate with the outside world run the risk of becoming obsolete in the medium term. This obsolescence is more noticeable in technology companies where the change and constant updating of computer equipment are much faster than in other sectors. In this sense, the arrival of 5G technology to the service industry will not only help to turn China into the world's leading economic power but will also change the way companies work thanks to its more significant potential. In this way, you can indeed turn the world into a global village, even in real time, thanks to the increased bandwidth and the higher speed achieved by the teams for the exchange of data.

Since the seminal paper by Miles et al. (1995), literature has focused to a new pattern of corporate innovation, as they are vectors of knowledge transmission (Figuereido et al., 2017; Miles, 2008) and a pattern of agents of knowledge dissemination and innovation to their clients. Innovation-related models vary in different territories, and this fact affects data information obtained from companies (Doloreux & Shearmur, 2010).

The objective of this book chapter is to analyze how their entrepreneurial ecosystems determine KIBS created by second-and-third generation family firms, and how their family and non-family members influence future entrepreneurs. In this business creation process, collaborative leadership skills are the ability to motivate, mobilize, and provide the necessary knowledge and competencies to stakeholders to articulate and promote a shared vision and consensus (Almeida, 2017; Chrislip, 2002; Vangen & Huxham, 2003; Bryson, Crosby, & Stone, 2006; Crosby & Bryson, 2005a; 2005b; Ansell & Gash, 2008; McKinney & Johnson, 2009).