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Techno-entrepreneurship is defined as the entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activities of both incumbent and nascent companies operating in a technology- or knowledge-intensive environment that encourages and fosters the development and introduction of technology-based and knowledge-intensive novel products, services, production methods, or business models (Therin, 2009; 2014). It serves as an important conduit to firm growth, job and new industry creation, and economic development (Acs et al., 2016; Audretsch, 2007; Baumol, 2010; Carree and Thurik, 2003; Yoon et al., 2018). Despite its significant socio-economic and spillover effects across other constituents of the global economy, technoentrepreneurship entails high risk and uncertainty that are mainly derived from the fast and dynamically changing nature of technology. Drawing on dynamic and broad views on the phenomenon, this handbook aims to deepen our understanding of techno-entrepreneurship by proposing novel theoretical frameworks, introducing emerging categories of techno-entrepreneurship, and exploring new patterns in entrepreneurial ecosystems and across different countries by using a variety of unique data sources. First, current research is showing that new theoretical frameworks are needed in order to cope with the growing relevance of techno-entrepreneurship initiatives in different countries (Shan et al., 2018; Chaudhry et al., 2018; Judge et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2009; Venkataram, 2004; Phan and Der Foo, 2004; Baark, 1994). At the same time, we have relatively little understanding about emerging categories of entrepreneurship. Accordingly, we include a chapter dedicated to proposing new roles of technological embeddedness in techno-entrepreneurship, and explore relatively new categories of entrepreneurship that are closely related to reverse and frugal innovation, the drone industry, and gender-specific entrepreneurship.

Within the span of a generation, innovation and entrepreneurship have emerged as two of the most vital forces in the economy and, even more broadly, in society (Link, 2017). It was not always that way. During the second industrial paradigm, or the era of mass production, particularly following World War II, innovation was barely on the radar screen of economics, management, and other social sciences. Rather, what mattered for economic performance was articulated concisely by the management scholar, Alfred Chandler (1990), in the title of his seminal analysis of firm competitiveness and productivity – Scale and Scope. Economic success lies in largescale production, which enabled companies to attain the highest levels of efficiency and productivity while reducing average cost to a minimum. The primacy of physical capital as the driving force underlying economic performance was mirrored at the macroeconomic level through the Solow (1956) model. Economic policy reflected the capital-driven economy with its focus on instruments to stimulate investment in physical capital. Innovation played at best a marginal role, which was considerably more than could be said for entrepreneurship. In an economy where scale and scope dictated competitiveness and efficiency, new and small firms were typically viewed as a burden on the economy, and they were characterized as constituting “sub optimal capacity,” meaning that they lacked sufficient scale to be efficient.