Persistencia emprendedora en el ecosistema innovador y tecnológico de Castilla y León

Resumen

Innovative and technological entrepreneurship is characterized for its robustness and its potential contribution to strengthen the regional development system by enhancing innovation, job creation and knowledge spillover. The Research and Innovation Smart Specialization Strategy (RIS3) for the comunidad autónoma of Castilla y León during the period 2021-2027 has defined the impulse and support of entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship committed to R& D as a priority. This priority seems of vital importance for a region experiencing a progressive entrepreneurial demography decline and a worrisome brain drain. Therefore, this doctoral thesis aims to enlighten innovation and technological entrepreneurs’ attitude toward entrepreneurial persistence under an uncertain and exposed situation like the one caused by SAR S-CoV-2. Results should be the identification of strengths and shortcomings within the entrepreneurial ecosystem in highly demanding circumstances as well as the potential needs for action to provide new impetus for entrepreneurial activity. The methodology consists of analyzing the interaction between several psychological variables, within a sample of representative entrepreneurs: realism, perceived self-efficacy, control under pressure and wellbeing with entrepreneurial persistence, whether in form of continuously running the founded company or opting for serial or portfolio entrepreneurship actions. The findings confirm a solid Spanish entrepreneurship proneness to consolidate the created company, even despite adverse circumstances. Moreover, the obtained results unveil a relative low proclivity to undertake habitual entrepreneurship, in this case strongly related to realism. A situation with no frame of reference, as result of lockdowns and prior unimaginable restrictions may account for the fact that some solid and empirically proved maxims such as the relation of realism, perceived self-efficacy, control under pressure and wellbeing with entrepreneurial persistence could not be fully confirmed under unusual and out of control conditions. Results show an almost non-existent relation between realism, self-efficacy, and control under pressure with the intention to consolidate and even a negative relation between wellbeing and the willpower to continue. It should be pointed out that wellbeing displayed by the population studied was so low that it may be considered, most precisely, as gradations of wellbeing absence. Concerning habitual entrepreneurship, realism influences, in a foreseeable manner, negatively entrepreneurship intentions. Control under pressure, understood as self-regulation, influences the propensity to start a new business, but only for the male study population. The conclusions of this study suggest a different psychological functioning among entrepreneurs, in the working context, during the pandemic than the common patterns backed by the expert’s community in the field, questioning the universality of the theoretical underpinnings and highlighting the weight of events and circumstances in the persistence decision. Based on the results, it is suggested to strongly reinforce entrepreneurial formal and informal institutional support in order to mitigate the entrepreneur’s vulnerability and to boost a high-quality entrepreneurial activity as warrant for jobs creation and talent retention, even attraction, in any given situation and even with greatest force in a crisis scenario, a situation where a high-quality entrepreneurial ecosystem gains for the socioeconomic regional progress in relevance.