Going local: placing entrepreneurial microgeographies in a larger regional context

ABSTRACT

As cities seek to promote innovation, they are increasingly investing in localised institutional entrepreneurial supports. Some institutions are hyperlocal, operating within distinct geographic sub-spaces and funnelling entrepreneurial ventures within spatially bounded microgeographies. In this paper, we focus on the University of North Carolina, where actors from the business school helped build a unique web of hyperlocal entrepreneurial supports that reinforced core educational and research missions but also culminated in proximate university business incubators. We examine how this programmatic changes correspond to a marked increase in entrepreneurial intensity as well as ageographic tightening of firms in and around the campus. Yet we also find evidence for an additional effect, namely an earlier launch of entrepreneurial firms based on less-tested technologies. The results speak to the power of institutional actors in shaping entrepreneurial activities while raising broader questions about the impact of university programming on regional industry and innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Microgeography
• bioscience
• entrepreneurship
• academic entrepreneurship
• innovation

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Josh Drucker and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank members of a larger research team who conducted or assisted with interviews and transcriptions for this project, including Daniel Fleck, Samantha Staffin, Paige Clayton, Alyse Polly, Elizabeth Yarnell, Rui Chen, and Maryann Feldman.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The database’s thirteen-country Triangle region reflects the state planning region. Since all but five of entrepreneurial companies were founded in the core three counties of Durham, Orange, and Wake, we chose to focus on this core and exclude those five companies.

² We relied on NETS data licenced by UNC. The NETS data can also be purchased directly from Walls and Associates.

³ See Staum (2007) for a discussion fuzzy matching using COMPGED in SAS.

⁴ For a longer discussion of this process, see Donegan (2016). Our matching algorithm is available upon request.

⁵ UNC is not the only university in the region to have expanded entrepreneurial programming during the study period, and including firms with links to either Duke and/or NCSU might introduce bias into the control group.

⁶ Available at http://geoservices.tamu.edu/Services/Geocode/.

⁷ Reflecting the varied nature of UNC’s entrepreneurial supports, facilities and programming vary significantly, making generalisations about programming difficult (Clayton, Feldman, and Lowe 2018).

⁸ There were 218 non-university-parented firms between 1990–2008 compared to only 23 between 2009–2012. This observed decline reflects a broader regional industrial event in the 1990 to 2008 time period: a series of mergers, particularly at GlaxoSmithKline. Associated layoffs and voluntary departures included generous severance packages and mobile patents that spawned a large number of non-university-parented firms. Those events were not replicated in the 2009–2012 time period. See Feldman and Lowe (2015) for a full discussion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Urban and Community Studies program at the University of Connecticut, the National Science Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.