在区域集群中培育高影响力创业（英）

Fostering High-ImpactEntrepreneurship in Regional KEY POINTS High-potentialentrepreneurship thatcan scale rapidly, attractsignificant finance, andcreate outsized employment Shu TianPrincipal EconomistEconomic Research and Development Erkko AutioProfessor and Chair in TechnologyVenturing and Entrepreneurship Five interrelatedmechanisms—knowledgespillovers, human-capitaldepth, capital and demanddensity, institutional Kun Fu Reader in Innovation andEntrepreneurship Yeng-May Tan Assistant Professor of Finance andHead, Master of Economics in FinanceSchool of Economics and Management Agglomeration benefitsaccumulate in a limitednumber of clusters,benefit high-qualityentrepreneurship Donghyun Park Director, Macroeconomicsand Monetary Policy Management Policy should prioritizeecosystem depth overstart-up counts, emphasizinglearning infrastructures;translational researchanchors and knowledge Over the past two decades, governments and scholars have embraced entrepreneurshipas a cornerstone of regional competitiveness and innovation-driven growth. While entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon,high-quality entrepreneurship—ventureswith rapid scaling potential and transformative impact—remains spatially confined to a limited number of regional ecosystems. Policy discourse has focused heavily on thequantityof new ventures, often measured by start-up rates, self-employment shares, or small-business density (Levie et al. 2014). Yet accumulating evidence suggests thatentrepreneurialqualityis distributed far more unevenly than entrepreneurial quantity.High-growth ventures—those able to scale rapidly, attract external finance, and generateoutsized employment and innovation impacts—tend to emerge in a small number ISBN 978-92-9277-682-4 (print)ISBN 978-92-9277-683-1 (PDF)ISSN 2071-7202 (print)ISSN 2218-2675 (PDF)Publication Stock No. BRF260042-2 ADB BRIEFS NO. 381 WHAT DRIVES AGGLOMERATION Economic geography has long recognized that productionand innovation cluster spatially. Marshall (1890) highlightedthe benefits of co-location in terms of localized knowledgespillovers, specialized labor markets, and shared supplier bases,while Porter (1998) emphasized competition and collaborationof geographic concentrations of interconnected firms andinstitutions. Saxenian (1994) demonstrated how social networksand labor mobility underpinned Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurialdominance, and Delgado et al. (2010) showed that strong clusters The entrepreneurial agglomeration literature identifiesagglomeration benefits that disproportionately accrue toknowledge-intensive and innovative start-ups (Baptista andSwann 1998, Delgado et al. 2010; Delgado, Porter, and Stern 2014). (i)Sharing, matching, and learning.Agglomeration allowsfirms to share specialized inputs, improves matchingwith skilled talent, and enables faster learning via denseknowledge exchange, which disproportionately gives riseto urban and cluster advantages and benefits innovative Recent evidence confirms that the geography of high-potentialentrepreneurship remains remarkably spiky. The StartupEcosystem Stars report (Mind the Bridge 2024) showsthat a small number of metropolitan regions account for adisproportionate share globally of scale-ups and venture-capitalflows.1The World Intellectual Property Organization(WIPO) Global Innovation Index (GII) identifies a top-heavy (ii)Knowledge spillovers.Knowledge-intensive start-upsexploit ideas that are hard to codify and travel poorly, aswell as geographic proximity, increase exposure to newknowledge through formal and informal channels (Carlino (iii)Specialized labor markets and finance.Agglomerationsprovide deeper pools of specialized talent and bettermatching between founders and key hires (Durantonand Puga 2004). Venture capital and other early-stagefinance concentrate geographically and favor nearby firms. Despite this regularity, the mechanisms linking place to high-qualityentrepreneurship remain contested. Much of the entrepreneurshipliterature has equated regional vibrancy with start-up volume,overlooking that only a small subset of firms—the so-called“gazelles,” “scale-ups,” or “unicorns”—drive most job creationand productivity growth (Delgado et al. 2010; Glaeser, Kerr, andPonzetto 2010). Recent work on entrepreneurial ecosystemsemphasizes how digital and spatial affordances jointly shape (iv)Ecosystem dynamics and institutions.Networks,governance, and institutional supports amplify spilloversand scaling pathways. The digital-era lean heuristic ofexperimentation-driven validated learning has fostered aculture of active experience sharing within entrepreneurial This policybrief examines the hypothesis thatthe geographic concentration of entrepreneurial activity in regional hotspots ispositively correlated with the quality of that activity. It argues thatwhile start-up formation is widespread, the conditions necessaryfor scaling—deep knowledge networks, sophisticated investors, Many of the benefits