The city and high-tech startups: The spatial organization of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship

Research on Schumpeterian entrepreneurship identifies new high-growth startup companies as key factors in technological innovation and economic growth. While economists have tended to focus on high-growth, high-tech startup firms as the unit of analysis, economic geographers and urbanists have examined the geographic dimensions of entrepreneurship, particularly the rise of entrepreneurial clusters and eco systems. We focus here on a particular type of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship associated with high-tech startup companies, or what we refer to as “tech-startup entrepreneurship.” We contend that the organization of such Schumpeterian entrepreneurship occurs at two spatial scales. At the macro-geographic level, it is highly clustered and concentrated in a relatively small number of global cities or metro areas. At the micro-geographic level, it is highly concentrated in distinct districts or micro-clusters within these leading cities and metro areas. To examine the geographic dimensions of tech-startup entrepreneurship across these spatial scales, we use previously unused data on venture capital-financed startups at the metropolitan and district levels. Our findings support the hypothesis that tech-startup entrepreneurship is organized across two distinct but related spatial scales, which act on entrepreneurial activity through different mechanisms. These findings suggest that local diversity and local specialization can simultaneously potentiate innovation, and that a multi-scalar approach to the geography of entrepreneurship is prudent.