The Geography of Entrepreneurial Support Networks

创业精神与区域集群的发展密切相关，但创业精神并不是凭空产生的。企业家必须动员人员、组织、市场和资源来支持他们的初创企业。这些参与者中的几个，如律师事务所和风险资本家，与其他人一起构成了公司的创业支持网络。尽管人们认识到这些行为者的重要性，但关于他们的所在地的研究很少。有一种假设是，这些支持行为者应该位于离企业家很近的地方。最近，一些空间科学家评论说，即使是高度集聚的行业，其内部特点是“局部嗡嗡”，也有“全球管道”通向集群外的参与者。这项研究项目将测试邻近假设，以确定其跨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大约2400家公司的数据库。这些数据提供了创业公司及其律师、风险资本家、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、成长和成熟的关键贡献者。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名义水平数据的统计可检验命题，而风险模型将用于检验创业公司上市速度的空间影响。该项目将把先前以科技公司为中心的研究扩展到这些基本上被忽视的创业公司，从而为这些行业及其创业支持网络是否表现出集群提供了新的见解。对于对区域经济发展感兴趣的从业者，结果将表明，尽管当地缺乏支持参与者，但可以在其中创建成功的创业公司的行业。对于那些没有那么多风险资本和其他支持网络参与者的地区来说，这一点尤为重要。该项目还将通过网站向其他学者提供数据库，其中包括许多地理上感兴趣的变量。这将允许其他研究人员以严格的数据兼容性来构建和扩展该项目。

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.