Entrepreneurial Human Capital: Implications for firms’ resilience and sustainability in rural and urban regions

This project focuses on how employees’ previous experiences of entrepreneurship affect firms´ productivity, adaptability, and innovation capacity. The importance of flexible and transformative firms is obvious in light of the current global challenges.

Consequently, we are operationalizing a hitherto unidentified competence factor in economic analysis that complements the traditional human capital measures of education level and previous professional experience.Entrepreneurial ability has in previous research been associated with adaptability and flexibility.

We intend to analyze how companies´ entrepreneurial human capital (EHC) can contribute to more sustainable production technologies and business models.

We highlight the differences between new and already established companies that are located in either rural or urban environments.

The empirical analysis is based on register-based data for the period 1995–2018, where we can track how individuals move between different employers and businesses.Two different measures are calculated for each company´s EHC: the proportion of employees in each company who have experience in entrepreneurship, and the total number of years that a company´s current workforce has been involved in entrepreneurship.

We emphasize the political implications linked to the SDGs 8, 9 and 10 (decent work and economic growth, industry and innovation, reduced inequalities within/between countries).