Entrepreneurship, Evolutionand Geography

IntroductionEntrepreneurship is a fundamental driver of economic evolution. It is also a distinctly spatially unevenprocess, and thus an important explanation of the uneven economic development of regions andnations. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurship is a key element of evolutionary economics (Schumpeter1934; Witt 1998; Grebel et al. 2003; Metcalfe 2004; Grebel 2007) and has been recognized as animportant element in explaining (regional) economic development (Acs and Armington 2004;Audretsch et al. 2006; Fritsch 2008). This means that the explanation of regional variations inentrepreneurship has also become an important issue. Even more so because there are pronounceddifferences within and between nations in rates of entrepreneurship and in their determinants (Bosmaand Schutjens 2008), and these differences tend to be persistent over time, reflecting path dependencein industry structure (Brenner and Fornahl 2008), institutions (Casper 2007) and culture (Saxenian1994) that vary widely across regions and countries, but are relatively inert over time.[...]