The character of innovative places: entrepreneurial strategy, economic development, and prosperity

By Maryann P. Feldman. 2014

331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Why do investments in certain places yield jobs, growth, and prosperity while similar investments made in seemingly identical places fail to produce the desired results? Starting with the observation that innovation clusters spatially across a broad spectrum of industries, my work seeks to understand the mechanisms and institutions that promote the creation of useful knowledge. In my conceptualization, entrepreneurs, as the agents who recognize opportunity, mobilize resources, and create value, are key to the creation of institutions and the building of capacity that will sustain regional economic development. Entrepreneurs benefit from location. But entrepreneurs are also pivotal as agents of change that can transform local communities. The initial event or entrepreneurial spark that gives rise to prosperous regions is not deterministic nor do they automatically set in motion path dependencies that automatically yield successful places. What matters most is human agency—the building of institutions and the myriad public and private decisions that determine what I call the character of place—a spirit of authenticity, engagement, and common purpose.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d7e83b630ab7f289841f4728b0ef2550a61480e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. David Urbano
2. M. Sanders
3. E. Malecki
4. Maribel Guerrero
5. E. Stam
6. Haifeng Qian
7. Alain Fayolle
8. N. Bosma

In Management of Technology and Innovation

1. David Urbano
2. Maribel Guerrero
3. E. Stam
4. E. Malecki
5. M. Sanders
6. Andrew H. Van de Ven
7. Alain Fayolle
8. Haifeng Qian

In Strategy and Management

1. E. Malecki
2. David Urbano
3. E. Stam
4. Maribel Guerrero
5. Andrew H. Van de Ven
6. N. Bosma
7. Haifeng Qian
8. P. Muñoz

Citations in the corpus

• Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems (2018, background): “Local and regional culture “is not static: the presence of successful, innovative entrepreneurs can spur others to follow in their footsteps” (Malecki & Spigel, 2017; Feldman, 2014).”
• Rural entrepreneurship in place: an integrated framework (2019, background): “In the former, literature has typically highlighted the presence of human capital, financing, innovative firms, mentorship and support systems, knowledge spillover capacity, robust regulatory frameworks, and major universities (among others) as enabling pillars of entrepreneurial contexts (Acs et al”
• Knowledge-Based Regional Economic Development: A Synthetic Review of Knowledge Spillovers, Entrepreneurship, and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (2018, background): “However, knowledge spillovers do not necessarily result in higher levels of societal knowledge (Feldman, 2014).”
• Entrepreneurial ecosystem elements (2019, background): “This leadership is critical in building and maintaining a healthy ecosystem (Feldman 2014).”
• The Relational Organization of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (2017, background): “These are people who “ live and work in a region and take responsibility for the stewardship of the place ” (Feldman, 2014 p. 4).”
• Zoom in, zoom out: Geographic scale and multinational activity (2018, unknown): “This approach has been termed microgeography (Feldman 2014).”
• Developing and governing entrepreneurial ecosystems: the structure of entrepreneurial support programs in Edinburgh, Scotland (2016, background): “…successful entrepreneurs (Spigel, 2015), the presence of dense social networks of entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors (Zacharakis et al., 2003, Feldman, 2014), research intensive universities that produce both new technological innovations and new entrepreneurs (Harrison and Leitch, 2010),…”
• Trinity of change agency, regional development paths and opportunity spaces (2020, background): “…it is the source for path-breaking innovations triggering new industrial specializations and the transformation of places (Foray et al., 2009; Feldman, 2014; Grillitsch, 2018) Second, new industrial growth paths often require institutional changes to be made possible to begin with (Sotarauta…”
• Entrepreneurial activity and regional competitiveness: evidence from European entrepreneurial universities (2016, background): “However, we also need to take into account the possible existence of reverse causality between an entrepreneurial university’s activities and economic impacts (Audretsch and Keilbach 2004) and between entrepreneurial environment and entrepreneurial activity (Feldman 2014).”
• Entrepreneurial ecosystems in cities: establishing the framework conditions (2016, unknown): “Good working conditions certainly affect the vibrancy of the local ecosystem and the quality of capacity in a local community, which enables entrepreneurs to develop a geographic community of common interest around their new ideas and technology (Feldman 2014).”
• Searching for the existence of entrepreneurial ecosystems: a regional cross-section growth regression approach (2017, background): “…that the local context does matter and entrepreneurs may have a key role in shaping and developing local entrepreneurial ecosystems (see, e.g., Feldman 2014), we suspect that our data is geographically too aggregated to distinguish the differential impact of local entrepreneurial ecosystems.”