Inside the Triangle: Advancing Research on Entrepreneurship and Firm Locations

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  • March 20, 2019
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  • Donegan, Mary
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of City and Regional Planning
Abstract
  • This dissertation focuses on the sub-regional, spatial arrangements of entrepreneurial bioscience companies in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina. The dissertation’s three papers tackle this topic in a systematic way, by (1) exploring why and how institutions develop policies that extend space-related resources to entrepreneurs, (2) analyzing the extent to which these space-related resources reshape the physical locations of entrepreneurial firms, and (3) comparing entrepreneurial establishment records from two different databases to determine which source is best for analyzing entrepreneurial firms. The first paper, Universities as Jurisdictionally Embedded Institutions, uses university business incubators as a means to examine how institutions (like universities) that are embedded within multiple jurisdictions (states, counties, and cities) develop policy. Previous research has attributed policy development to two separate factors: university culture and regional characteristics. The research shows, however, that the institution’s embeddedness in layers of political jurisdictions influences university cultures around entrepreneurship and development. The dissertation’s second paper, Institutionally Bound Resources and Firm Location Decisions, examines how UNC’s policies have reshaped firm microgeographies. The entrepreneurial literature has not fully addressed the fact that many regional resources are institutionally bound, and available only to members of that institution’s community. In this paper I examine UNC’s introduction of spatial, institutionally bound resources (business incubators for entrepreneurial firms), and find that these resources have disrupted previously defined spatial patterns among firms with access to these resources. The dissertation’s third paper, How Does Database Selection Influence our Understanding of Entrepreneurial Regions?, recreates an externally defined reference list of entrepreneurial bioscience firms in two different databases: the National Establishment Time Series database, a private database, and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, a government database. This paper seeks to divide observed differences into differences that arise as the result of database design differences and those that arise as the result of private database inaccuracies. After adjusting the private data by the hypothesized driver of difference between the two databases, the paper concludes that observed differences between the two databases are driven not by private database inaccuracies, but rather by purposeful design differences between the two databases.
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Rodriguez, Daniel
  • Feldman, Maryann
  • BenDor, Todd
  • Lester, T. William
  • Lowe, Nichola
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2016
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