This project will increase understanding of the processes and institutional supports that promote and sustain regional economic development. Regions are important platforms for promoting entrepreneurial activity; however, there have been few attempts to capture the dynamic processes that affect how innovative organizations work together, adapt and improvise to define a functioning entrepreneurial economy. Through an empirical investigation of North Carolina's Research Triangle Region, the project investigate multiple pathways of entrepreneurial development and consider how combinations of public and private investments affect the survival and growth of firms and industries. A better understanding of the multiple pathways and interventions that support regional entrepreneurship will, in turn, enhance development of policy for innovation and entrepreneurship.
The project studies the entrepreneurial regional economy of the Research Triangle through a comprehensive analysis of both entrepreneurial and established firms, supporting institutions and the myriad transactions that unite them. To support our analysis, the project team has created a unique relational database, which contains longitudinal data on technology-intensive ventures in the region. This database currently contains information on the attributes of over 4,200 companies in the Triangle region, events related to the company's growth and survival and biographic information on the company's founders. For each firm, the database also traces the level and sequence of institutional support from key Federal, state and local entrepreneurial and economic development agencies. These data uniquely capture the universe of regional technology start-ups, including information on companies known to have gone out of business, merged or been acquired, a subset of firms that is frequently unavailable but essential to entrepreneurial dynamics. The database has been designed as a resource for state and Federal policy development, with the goal of further enhancing regional innovative capacity.
Broader impact. Around the world, policy makers search for appropriate economic development policies and investments. Many look to North Carolina's Research Triangle as an example of successful policy-led economic development yet the precise mechanisms and policy levers are not well known. As a result, there is a tendency to downplay the influence of policy interventions and interactions on firm strategy and development. This project offers a data-driven solution by providing an essential resource for tracing the sequence of interventions and facilitating events that contribute to and help sustain entrepreneurial development. It also helps to reveal the existence of multiple entrepreneurial pathways that support new firm formation. For example, the data already collected reveal that entrepreneurial firms are just as likely to emerge from university-based technology transfer systems as they are from large multinational corporations that incubate entrepreneurial talent and skill. The project's objective is to create a transferable framework for analyzing regional dynamics elsewhere. This study of the Research Triangle provides a test case for compiling and collecting data at both the firm and institutional levels that would be transferable to other regions.
