Third places, the connective fibre of cities and high-tech entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

Urban ‘third places’ foster informal interactions and face-to-face contact that is critical to the development of new innovations and start-up businesses. Our research utilises extensive microdata in combination with telephone interviews with over 200 start-up companies in Stockholm, Sweden. Our findings indicate that access to third places has a significant impact on the number of new high-tech start-ups (both by entrepreneur place of residence and work) in their vicinity. This suggests that third places play a demonstrable role in innovation and economic growth.

KEYWORDS:

• third places
• entrepreneurship
• innovation
• high-tech start-ups
• start-up ecosystems

JEL:

• L26
• R12
• R23

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ETHICS STATEMENT

Informed consent on the research project, data collection and anonymisation process was provided to the survey participants in this study. Ethical approval as a part of the larger project ‘Geographical Aspects on Economic Performance and Individual Wellbeing’ (Dnr: 2018/174-31) was provided by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority in Linköping, Sweden.

Notes

1. For more information about RegSO, see Statistics Sweden at https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/regional-statistik-och-kartor/regionala-indelningar/regso---regionala-statistikomraden/

2. We naturally do not rule out the role that other third places, besides the ones we include, are also important for knowledge spillovers, for example, places such as gyms or beauty salons. However, to keep the analysis clear, we try not to have a too heterogenous definition of third places.

3. We also included accessibility to venture capitalists as a control variable, which showed to be significant and positively related to entrepreneurship. However, we only have data for 2012 and 2013 for that variable, and therefore we do not include it in the main estimations. The results are available upon request.

4. High-tech firms are defined as belonging to the high-tech, medium high-tech and knowledge-intensive services according to the Eurostat classification.

5. Alternatives 1 and 2 were recoded as 1, alternative 3 was recoded as 2, and alternatives 4 and 5 were recoded as 3.