The Knowledge Context and the Entrepreneurial Process: Academic, User and Employee Entrepreneurship

The knowledge context is the social, economic, and organizational setting within which an individual is situated. This paper ties together observations from three distinct empirical areas of the entrepreneurship literature--academic entrepreneurship, employee entrepreneurship, and user entrepreneurship--to build a cohesive framework for understanding how the knowledge context shapes the perspectives and behaviors of individual entrepreneurs. Based on our framework, we propose that the knowledge context influences individual and industry level patterns such as the career stage at which individuals are most likely to engage in entrepreneurial activity, formation of new firms over the course of the industry life cycle, and geographic clustering of firms.