This collection of essays on innovation, entrepreneurship and policy making in Southeast Asia is an ambitious project. The editors of the volume, Stavros Sindakis and Christian Walter, suggest the book may be used as a text for students of entrepreneurship, innovation, management and policy making. The book is specifically targeted to Asian universities that provide or plan to develop programs dealing with such topics. Furthermore, according to the editors the book will be of interest for anyone inhabiting the “start-up ecosystem, which is struggling to comprehend what it takes to build products for the region and how to enter emerging markets” (p. xv). Does the book stand up to its aspirations?
In five sections the reader learns about new business creation (section I) and financing new entrepreneurial activities (section II), we read about organizational aspects of entrepreneurship (section III), about the role of knowledge and innovation in economic development (section IV), and finally the notion of environmental sustainability and its influence on entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia is considered (section V). A couple of prominent themes run throughout these sections. Contributing authors ponder about challenges in educating entrepreneurs and about the enabling or limiting role of government in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation. Finally, novel sounding concepts such as angel investment (chapter 5) or intrapreneurship (chapter 6) are introduced. Since angel investment is simply another term for private lending and since intrapreneuship is nothing else than entrepreneurship within organizations (see Foss and Klein, 2012 for excellent analysis of the organization of entrepreneurial judgment), these concepts merely bring old wine in new-looking bottles.
The concept of quadruple helix is the most prominent theme of the book. In fact, it is the structure of DNA that inspires the metaphorical use of this notion in the analysis of what is called knowledge production systems. Stefania Paladini and Eleni Anoyrkati (chapter 13) summarize: “Several ‘helices multiple models’ have been proposed for analyzing and to certain extent for predicting innovation pattern in the twenty-first century […] the basic triple helix stresses the university-industry-government relation, the quadruple model embeds a technological-savvy civil society in this equation” (p. 285).
While the original concept of triple helix points to the interplay of universities, government and private firms in the knowledge production system, the concept of quadruple helix adds social and cultural context to the equation. This “fourth cooperative actor or pillar to the triple helix model” has been, as Irene Y.H. Fan (chapter 12) points out, defined in a number of different ways ranging from user communities through civil society all the way to the general public. According to the quadruple helix construction then, this widely defined fourth factor should (along with the university-industry-government triangle) shape, enable as well as limit and constrain the way through which new inventions get transformed into useful innovations. Is this so? Indeed, having reviewed the World Bank Knowledge Assessment data set (Chen and Dahlman 2005), Scott Erickson (chapter 7) concludes that “the private sector, government, university, and social/cultural worlds intersect and intertwine, providing support for each other,” adding that the “quadruple helix approach might help to explain the differences while also guiding public policy decisions” (p. 154, emphasis mine). This conclusion is disappointingly vague.
Policy recommendations in this book do not go beyond simple government activism. Throughout all sections entrepreneurship is unambiguously considered as a positive factor and the possibility that entrepreneurship could be unproductive or outright destructive depending on the institutional rules of the game (Baumol, 1990) is never mentioned. Furthermore, authors generally revolve around the Shumpeterian concept of entrepreneurship as innovation which often ends up watered down to a measure of registered startups and new business openings. The problem then boils down to the question of getting more entrepreneurship (measured by startups) and consequently, getting more innovation out of entrepreneurship. How to do this? David Gomulya et al. (chapter 3) and Wilton Chau (chapter 5) call for government programs educating entrepreneurs, Jarunee Wonglimpiyarat (chapter 4) stresses the importance of financing entrepreneurship by way of effective funding policies and Adith Cheosakul (chapter 10) recommends that “all stakeholders put concerted efforts” toward promoting business plan competitions on the grounds that it would be “illogical and unreasonable to deny” that the teams and audiences participating in these competitions “become instilled with the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit” so that some of them become eventually active entrepreneurs. There is no doubt that all of these policy interventions will have some effect. It is not at all clear, however, what the relative costs of these recommended programs are.
To conclude, I see two main conceptual problems the book runs into. First, entrepreneurs do not just innovate as the book might suggest. It is often the case that entrepreneurs imagine opportunities that no one else can see (Kirzner, 1973). But the alert Kirznerian entrepreneur who buys low and sells high thus generating pure entrepreneurial profits is completely ignored in the volume. Nor do we find Saras Sarasvathy’s (2008) notion of entrepreneurship as an effectual process. The concept of effectuation is relevant for teaching entrepreneurship and it figures prominently in contemporary debates on strategic management. The narrow focus on what the defining features of entrepreneurship are is a grave shortcoming in a book that tries to explain the rise of entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia. Second, innovation cannot be reduced to mere business creation or even to bringing about new combinations. Too often we seem to overlook that before entrepreneurs can open a new business or turn an invention into a useful innovation they must make sure that the new combination will not be frowned upon. Not one of the authors pays attention to this problem of social embeddedness of entrepreneurship. When the authors talk about economic growth they often think in terms of innovation and technological change at the frontier. But pushing the technological frontier is not the only way to achieve growth and development. In fact, in the original version of his Theory of Economic Development, Schumpeter (1911) noticed that the capacity of the entrepreneurial leader to “get other people to assist him in carrying out the new combinations” (Swedberg, 2002, p. 234) is not unlimited. One of the important but understudied entrepreneurial tasks is then not pushing the technological frontier but rather convincing others to make use of artifacts (goods, services, processes) that work in other contexts and therefore legitimizing their use within local conditions. This kind of catch-up growth is not about producing something that is brand new. Rather, it concerns getting access to the assets that are already available elsewhere by way of overcoming social and institutional barriers which are often more binding than technological limitations entrepreneurs might face.
The central notion that social, institutional and cultural factors somehow matter for entrepreneurship runs through the whole book embodied in the quadruple helix framework. It is laudable that authors recognize the importance of social, institutional and cultural effects on entrepreneurship and innovation (as David Stark (2011) points out, it might in fact be useful to think of entrepreneurship as a property of social groups, not as a feature that individuals have). But the theoretical treatment of how the rules of the game interact with entrepreneurship remains underdeveloped and the empirical evidence presented is not convincing of either its internal or external validity. Ignoring the importance of institutional rules in structuring incentives that entrepreneurs follow makes this analytical attempt lacking.
