ABSTRACT
The popular business and policy literature abounds in prescriptions for how to grow entrepreneurial economies, or in more fancy terms ‘entrepreneurial ecosystems’ (Feld 2012; Isenberg 2010). 2 There is a much longer academic tradition in studies on entrepreneurship 3 and regional development, going back to urban economic studies on new firm formation in large cities like New York (Chinitz 1961; Hoover and Vernon 1959; Jacobs 1969), and regional economic studies on Silicon Valley (Hall and Markusen 1985; Saxenian 1994) and other prominent clusters (Porter 1990). In this chapter we will provide an overview of current academic knowledge about regional conditions for entrepreneurship and on how entrepreneurship leads to regional development. In the final section we reflect on several key issues for future research on entrepreneurship and regional development.
