Innovation and entrepreneurship in knowledge industries Domingo Ribeiro Soriano a, ⁎, Kun-Huang Huarng b a Facultad de Economia de la University of Valencia and Instituto IUDESCOOP, Edificio Departamental Oriental, Campus de los Naranjos, 46022 Valencia, Spain b Department of International Trade, Feng Chia University, 100 Wenhwa Road, Seatwen, Taichung 40724, Taiwan abstract article info Article history: Received 1 November 2012 Received in revised form 1 December 2012 Accepted 1 January 2013 Available online 6 March 2013 Keywords: Entrepreneurship Innovation Knowledge This paper summarizes the best papers of the Global Innovation and Knowledge Academy (GIKA) conference, which took place in July 2012 in Valencia, Spain. The Journal of Business Research hereby publishes a special issue entitled Innovation and entrepreneurship in knowledge industries. This special issue includes 22 papers and the editorial. All of them went through double-blind reviews and revisions. These papers contribute to various perspectives of innovation and entrepreneurship in different countries. Innovation is considered a specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The papers in this special issue cover a variety of topics in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The first International Conference on Innovation and Entrepre- neurship in Knowledge Industries co-sponsored by the Global Inno- vation and Knowledge Academy (GIKA) and the Journal of Business Research, took place on July 10th to 12th, 2012, in Valencia, Spain. The keynote speakers included GIKA Honorary Chair, Professor Arch G. Woodside from Boston College, USA. The Conference comprised a total of 78 presentations, and 22 of them appear here in the special issue in the Journal. Presenting highly interesting and high-quality papers that are to provide relevant and rigorous insights into the critical issues of innovation and entrepreneurship in the special issue of the Journal of Business Research is a great pleasure and honor for the co-guest editors. The conference was very successful in the sense of gathering scholars from several countries, such as Canada, China, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Japan, Liechtenstein, The Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UAE, the UK, and the USA; including participants and speakers from a variety of countries around the world who presented their papers and obtained criticisms and feedback from the editors. Practitioners as well as researchers shared empirical research, including applied studies, comparative case studies, as well as teaching cases relevant to entrepreneurship and innovation. The conference papers went through a double-blind peer review process and the editors are proud to include those judged as making the greatest contribution to the understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship in this spe- cial issue. The papers in this issue address a variety of innovation and entre- preneurship themes within knowledge industries. The editors pro- vide in the next section a review of the present context in which readers may analyze the papers. Therefore the following studies have much to offer readers with interests in the field of entrepreneur- ship and strategies of innovation. The final section will provide more detail on all the papers in this special issue. 2. Why a special issue on innovation and entrepreneurship in knowledge industries? Entrepreneurship is a milestone on the road towards economic progress, and makes a huge contribution towards the quality and fu- ture hopes of a sector, economy or even a country. Entrepreneurship is as important in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and local markets as in large companies, and national and international markets, and is just as key a consideration for public companies as for private organizations. Entrepreneurship helps to encourage the competition in the current environment that leads to the effects of globalization. The role of the entrepreneurs is crucial in creating new economic activities that help to generate wealth, jobs and growth, as well as ensuring the well-being of society (Avlonitis & Salavou, 2007; Busenitz et al., 2003; Garcés-Ayerbe, Rivera-Torres, & Murillo-Luna, 2012; Lee, Hwang, & Choi, 2012; Soriano & Peris-Ortiz, 2011). For its part, innovation is the single business activity that most closely relates to economic growth. Schumpeter (1934), in his well-known study, The Theory of Economic Development, likens the entrepreneur to the innova- tor in that the task of both of these economic players is to introduce new inventions into productive activity (Dibrell, Craig, & Hansen, 2011; Laforet, 2008; Mousa & Wales, 2012). So innovations by entrepreneurs tip the balance in the economy and lead to a process of creative destruc- tion, via which firms that do not adopt the new technologies disappear. Journal of Business Research 66 (2013) 1964–1969 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: domingo.ribeiro@uv.es (D.R. Soriano), khhuarng@mail.fcu.edu.tw (K.-H. Huarng). 0148-2963/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.02.019 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Business Research