The Geography of Entrepreneurial Support Networks

创业和区域集群的增长密切相关，但创业并不是在真空中产生的。 企业家必须动员人们、组织、市场和资源来支持他们的初创企业。 其中一些行为者，如律师事务所和风险资本家，与其他行为者一起，构成了公司的创业支助网络。 尽管这些行为者的重要性得到了承认，但对其所在地的研究却很少。 有一种假设是，这些支助行为者应设在企业家附近。 最近，一些空间科学家指出，即使是高度集群化的产业，其内部特点是“本地嗡嗡声”，也有“全球管道”通往集群外的行为者。 该研究项目将测试邻近假设，以确定其在行业和地区的有效性。 该项目将利用1996年至2006年期间在美国上市的约2 400家公司的数据库。 这些数据提供了创业公司及其律师、风险投资家、董事会其他成员和首席投资银行家的确切位置--所有这些都是创业公司诞生、成长和成熟的关键因素。 卡方分析将主要用于基于关于创业公司及其创业支持网络成员的接近程度的名义水平数据的统计可检验命题，而风险模型将用于检查空间对创业公司上市速度的影响。本项目将把以前以技术公司为中心的研究扩展到这些被忽视的创业公司，从而为这些产业及其创业支持网络是否呈现集群现象提供了新的见解。 对于对区域经济发展感兴趣的从业者来说，研究结果将表明，尽管缺乏当地的支持者，但在这些行业中可以创建成功的创业公司。 这对于风险资本和其他支助网络行为体不那么丰富的区域尤其重要。 该项目还将通过一个网站向其他学者提供该数据库及其众多地理变量。 这将允许其他研究人员在严格的数据兼容性下构建和扩展该项目。

Entrepreneurship and the growth of regional clusters are intimately related, but entrepreneurship does not occur in a vacuum. The entrepreneur must mobilize people, organizations, markets, and resources to support their fledgling venture. Several of these actors, such as law firms and venture capitalists, together with others, comprise a firm's entrepreneurial support network. Despite the recognition of the importance of these actors, there has been little research on their location. There has been an assumption that these supporting actors should be located in close proximity to the entrepreneurs. More recently, some spatial scientists have remarked that even highly clustered industries characterized internally by "local buzz" have "global pipelines" to actors outside the cluster. This research project will test the assumption of proximity to determine its validity across industries and regions. The project will draw upon a database of the approximately 2,400 firms that went public between 1996 and 2006 in the United States. These data provide the exact locations of the startup firm and its lawyer, venture capitalists, other members of its board of directors, and its lead investment banker -- all key contributors to the birth, growth, and maturation of an entrepreneurial firm. Chi square analysis will be used primarily for statistically testable propositions based on nominal level data regarding the proximity of startup firms and members of their entrepreneurial support network, while a hazard model will be used to examine the spatial influences on the speed with which startups go public.This project will extend previous technology firm-centric research to these largely neglected entrepreneurial firms, thereby offering new insight into whether these industries and their entrepreneurial support networks exhibit clustering. For practitioners interested in regional economic development, the results will suggest industries within which successful entrepreneurial firms can be created despite a scarcity of local support actors. This is particularly important for regions not as richly endowed with venture capital and other support network actors. The project also will make available, via a website, the database with its numerous variables of geographic interest to other scholars. This will permit other researchers to build and extend this project with strict data compatibility.