Department(s)

Graduate School of Education and Psychology

Document Type

Article

Version Deposited

Published version

Publication Date

1-1-2022

Keywords

Entrepreneurial ecosystems, Industry knowledge, Internet, Law firms, Silicon Valley, Venture capital

Abstract

Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) are composed not only of startups but also the organizations that support them. Theory has been ambivalent about whether an EE is spatially bounded or includes distant organizations. This exploratory study uses a time series of all Internet industry initial public offerings (IPO) to explore the locational changes not only of startups but also four key EE service providers: lawyers, investment bankers, venture capitalists, and board directors. We find that while the startups became only slightly more concentrated, the EE service providers concentrated more rapidly, as an industry center in Silicon Valley emerged. Our results suggest that over the industry life cycle, industry knowledge exhibits a tendency to spatially concentrate, and this results in a concentration of industry-specific EE service providers that is even greater than the more gradual concentration of startups. As a result, startups, wherever they are located, increasingly source EE services from the industrial knowledge concentration.

Publication Title

Small Business Economics

ISSN

0921898X

E-ISSN

15730913

DOI

10.1007/s11187-022-00681-y

Comments

Publication can be found at this link:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-022-00681-y

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