The Role Of Information Availability: A Longitudinal Analysis Of Technology Entrepreneurship

The rapid spread of digital technologies has fostered an assumption that all entrepreneurs have equal and easy access to knowledge stocks irrespective of their context. We challenge this assumption by examining the contextual influence of information availability and argue that technology entrepreneurship involves a search process reliant on timely access to ideational components. We hypothesize that in contexts where information is more readily available, potential technology entrepreneurs are at an advantage, resulting in higher rates of technology entrepreneurship. Even after controlling for other important factors, such as polity, educational attainment, research and development spending, foreign direct investment, and gross domestic product growth, our results show a positive relationship between information availability and the proportion of entrepreneurs who pursue technology-based ventures instead of low-tech ventures. We further find that the effect of infor-mation availability on technology entrepreneurship increases in the presence of stronger intellectual property rights, suggesting that information availability enhances technology entrepreneurship more readily in contexts with incentives for innovation disclosure.