Seeing the Forestandthe Trees: Exploring the Impact of Inter- and Intra-Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Embeddedness on New Venture Creation

Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) has tended to focus on the role that characteristics internal to the EE play in determining EE-level outcomes. Notwithstanding the insights that academics, policy makers, and entrepreneurs have gleaned from these studies, prior research has yet to explain whether, how, and why these outcomes might also be impacted by an EE’s position within the larger network of EEs. Given broad acceptance for the important role that networks play in facilitating entrepreneurship at the firm-level, we contend that adopting a network-based view of EEs may also help predict and explain aggregate entrepreneurial outcomes at the EE-level. Specifically, we adopt a double embeddedness lens to examine the impact of both inter-EE (i.e., structural embeddedness) and intra-EE (i.e., cultural embeddedness) factors on EE-level new venture creation. Using a longitudinal sample of regional data in the United States from 1994 to 2016, we develop and test hypotheses where the relationship between structural embeddedness and new venture creation follows an inverted U shape that is itself moderated by cultural embeddedness. We conclude by discussing how these findings inform theory and practice in this area.