This paper argues that outbreaks of infectious diseases should be understood as socio‐spatial processes with complex geographies. Considering the different dimensions of space through which an outbreak unfolds, facilitates analysing spatial diffusion of infectious disease in contemporary societies. We attempt to highlight four relevant dimensions of space by applying the TPSN framework to the case of the recent COVID‐19 outbreak in Germany. By identifying key processes of disease diffusion in space, we can explain the spatial patterns of the COVID‐19 outbreak in Germany, which did not feature the well‐known patterns of spatially contagious as in or hierarchical diffusion. In contrast, we find superspreading events and especially relocation diffusion based on existing networks, on which the pathogen travelled like a blind passenger, to be more relevant. For us, these findings prove the value of combining relational thinking with geographic analysis for understanding epidemic outbreaks in contemporary societies.

In spatial terms, entrepreneurial ecosystems are mostly conceptualized as confined to a specific territory. At the same time, the growing relevance of entrepreneurship in digital fields is underlined. This paper argues that this is contradictory since territorial thinking underestimates the disruptive qualities of new entrepreneurial practices in the digital economy. Using process-based, qualitative case studies on seed accelerators from four regions: Amsterdam, Berlin, Detroit and Hamburg, this study seeks to explore knowledge brokering in entrepreneurship ecosystems and analyzes the corresponding spatial dynamics. Our findings imply that startups in digital fields share knowledge about business models and technologies in a way that is unattainable in classical knowledge clusters. Moreover, we show that most of the observed entrepreneurial practices in seed accelerators crucially rely on extra-regional resources and thus remain only incompletely embedded into the respective regions. Against the background of these results, we suggest that entrepreneurial ecosystems should not be primarily viewed as territorial phenomena. Instead, we suggest that the territorial view on entrepreneurship ecosystems should be complemented with a topological view that foregrounds entrepreneurship as a trans-locally shared practice that is tangent to different regions in different ways.

Venture capital (VC) firms are crucial actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Through the development towards a digital economy, they have gained further relevance, which caused the VC industry to diversify in terms of business models. This article offers a new heuristic to study the VC industry by developing a classification of VC firms. By drawing on a framework of different dimensions of relational distance in investment relations, different types of relational coordination are identified by comparing VC firms in Germany. The types of VC business models are found to produce relational geographies of investing as they relate with their portfolio startups in different ways. A relational perspective on VC thus provides the opportunity to step beyond pure territorial approaches on VC.