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During the 1980s and early 1990s it was widely reported that large parts of the European countryside experienced considerable industrial growth led by a burgeoning of small and medium‐scale enterprises. The growth of these firms was closely associated with an expansion of trade and the intensification of competition on a world scale and the renaissance of industrial districts in specific localities. Within this context the notion of the “network” has been deployed in order to explore the complex interrelationships that exist in the relatively uncharted territory that lies between enterprises. This concept is employed to show how production units without any apparent legal connections establish a web of relationships in terms of flows of materials, information and finance. Social networks of entrepreneurs often lie behind the multitude of inter‐firm linkages. Focuses on a garment‐producing district of the northern Greek region of Macedonia that has experienced an explosion of enterprises and jobs since the early 1970s. Drawing on the experience of the small town of Polikastro and the adjoining rural county of Peonia, sets out to explore the processes of subcontracting and production networking. Aims to investigate the form and the nature of interorganizational relationships within the locality as well between rural industrialists, urban intermediaries and parent enterprises abroad. Examines changes in the linkages between firms within the context of developments that have taken place in the local communities and in the international marketplace.

This paper aims to investigate the evolution, roots and influence of the rural entrepreneurship literature.

Using a bibliometric exercise, the analysis starts with investigation of studies on entrepreneurship and gathering all (772) articles on rural entrepreneurship (from 1981 to 2020) found in both Scopus and Web of Science up to 15 August 2020. Citation analysis of the references/citations of 755 articles are listed in the abstract database, generating a citation database involving 46,432 references/citations. This paper considers 635 (out of the 772) articles on rural entrepreneurship (i.e. articles cited in one or more studies), generating a database of 10,767 studies influenced by the rural entrepreneurship literature.

This study discovers that the relative importance of rural entrepreneurship within the entrepreneurship literature has increased in the last few years, but rural entrepreneurship remains a European concern; the most frequently addressed topics include growth and development, institutional frameworks and governance and rurality, with theory building being rather understudied. Most of the studies on rural entrepreneurship are empirical, involving mainly qualitative analyses and targeting high income countries; rural entrepreneurship is rooted in the fields of economics and entrepreneurship and is relatively self-referential.

This study provides a comprehensive and updated investigation of evolution of the rural entrepreneurship literature. The assessment of the literature’s scientific roots of rural entrepreneurship had not yet been tackled before. To the best of the author’s knowledge this study can be considered as the first effort for identifying the scientific influence of the rural entrepreneurship literature.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the impacts of the transaction costs rationale on economic agents’ innovative results when they engage in European R & D networks, supplying both firms and policymakers with empirical support for improved decision making toward economic competitiveness and construction of the European research area. Furthermore, unlike many transaction cost economics assessments, the authors evaluate the existence of transaction costs following a dynamic framework of analysis (instead of using solely ex ante governance choice as a driver of inter-firm “friction” management), offering a novel perspective on these phenomena.

Data consist of firm-level information from Eureka’s Final Reports (1995-2006) for Spanish, Italian, French, British and German firms. Empirical assessments were performed through a two-step approach of direct and indirect effects of network management and potential sources of disturbances. Ordinal regressions were applied in order to identify transaction costs’ relevance as drivers of firms’ technological and commercial outcomes, as well as on managerial quality of alliances. Statistical controls include microeconomic and project-specific variables.

Results highlight the role played by transactional aspects as drivers of companies’ outcomes and managerial complexity. Furthermore, the authors find robust evidence that formal ex ante governance structures are incapable of satisfactorily addressing dynamic disturbances that take place within R & D networks. Whereas such findings are directly related to existing transaction costs, the authors find no support for the usual variables attributed to increased complexity in international inter-firm relationships.

Self-selection issues are inherently related to the research instrument (i.e. Eureka’s Reports), while further firm-level data could not be obtained since confidentiality issues protected companies’ names and sectors. Also, network-level data are not available, allowing the evaluation of individual perceptions only.

While literature addresses the issue of transaction costs in R & D networks via theoretical assumptions and rough proxies, this assessment offers an in-depth evaluation of a set of valuable indicators with direct implications for researchers, managers and policymakers. Main contributions concern the identification of dynamic interactions (and their respective disturbances) as a key feature of the overall performance of R & D networks, stressing the non-linearity of economic processes in these hybrid relationships, an issue that has been poorly tackled by previous empirical investigations.