Towards an entrepreneurial ecosystem typology for regional economic development: the role of creative class and entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

Who drives regional economic development in entrepreneurial ecosystems of different types? Using longitudinal data on 267 NUTS-3 European regions during the period 2008–16, we apply the entrepreneurial ecosystem theoretical framework to study how entrepreneurial ecosystem type moderates the relationship between a variety of entrepreneurship and regional economic development. It is found that regional economic development proxied by gross value added per resident responds differently to solo self-employment, job creators and new-firm birth rates as well as changes in a share of productive high-growth entrepreneurship across different entrepreneurial ecosystems. The findings have implications for regional and national policy-makers and scholars who study the geography of entrepreneurship.

KEYWORDS:

• entrepreneurial ecosystem
• productive entrepreneurship
• creative class
• regional development
• Europe
• entrepreneurship type

JEL:

• L26
• M13
• O18
• R11

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. One limitation highlighted by readers is that most Bohemians are self-employed and therefore the method will include the interaction of solo self-employment rates in a region with a proxy for a high concentration of creative industries. This is not the case for European cities. The correlation coefficient between the share of solo self-employed and specialized clusters in creative industries in this study is negative (−0.15) and statistically significant.

2. The results are available from the authors upon request.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy [grant number IC160084].