Release date: June 7, 2022
Speaker: Olav Sorenson (UCLA)
Description: In this webinar, Olav Sorenson, UCLA, presents “The Spatial Ecology of Entrepreneurship.” Why do some regions produce more entrepreneurs in specific industries than others? An ecological lens provides insight into this question: the demography of organizations in a region— particularly the number of firms in an industry and the proportion of them that are small and young—shapes many aspects of the environment for would-be entrepreneurs: (i) beliefs about the desirability of founding a firm, (ii) opportunities to learn about the industry and entrepreneurship and to build the abilities and social capital needed to succeed and (iii) the ease of acquiring critical resources. In this talk, Sorenson discusses these themes in past research and some of the directions for new research suggested by this perspective.