Where to Go from Here? Entrepreneurs’ Post-Incubation Location Decisions

• In Event: Entrepreneurial Support Organizations as Innovation Infrastructure: Ecosystem Roles, Reach, and Policy Implications

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are apt to choose the region that is ‘home’ when deciding where to start their firms (Dahl & Sorenson, 2012). This phenomenon is at odds with neoclassical economics, which predicts entrepreneurs should city-hop to maximize profit. Attachment to place is not the entire story of firm location, though (Motoyama 2022). Entrepreneurs need a variety of specialized resources and access to capital sources (Stephens et al. 2019) that may not be available in their desired locale. Often, they seek out and locate in entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) to help them develop and access resources. This forces a location decision into the ESO. This paper investigates location choices once start-ups leave the ESO. 

Specifically, this paper traces start-ups’ post-incubator locations to understand how one longstanding university ESO may shape the geography of a local entrepreneurial ecosystem. The paper hypothesizes that location decisions may be grouped into three motivations: 1) economic, 2) home/place-bias, and 3) external forces (e.g., VC requires a move). To study movement patterns the paper provides an in-depth, quantitative analysis of start-ups in Atlanta Georgia USA, a growing technology hub, relying on a new dataset on Georgia entrepreneurship (PLACE: Georgia) that combines data from multiple sources including business registrations, web scraped ESO participation archives, Crunchbase, and others, supplemented with informational interviews. Findings indicate most startup movement occurs within metropolitan Atlanta to certain economic corridors, with some additional movement out of state and explore the consequences for the literature on entrepreneurial ecosystem geography and entrepreneur location decisions.

Author

• YIFEI CHEN, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author