Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) consist of interacting components, which foster new firm formation and associated regional entrepreneurial activities. Current work on EE, however, focuses on documenting the presence of system components, which means there is little understanding of interdependencies between EE components and their evolutionary dynamics. To address these issues, the objective of the present study is to develop an evolutionary framework of EE development that integrates important components from prior work and describes how critical elements of an entrepreneurial system interact and evolve over time. The value of this framework in understanding the evolutionary dynamics of EE will be demonstrated by profiling the EE of Phoenix, Arizona. The evolutionary perspective developed is valuable because it provides a sense of how history, culture and the institutional setting impact EE. It also provides stakeholders with action points to help maintain or propel an EE to the next level. This is a distinct improvement over static approaches that provide a list of EE ingredients with no sense of their relative importance over time. The proposed framework may also be used in a comparative context to compare and contrast the evolutionary trajectory of EE to better understand why particular places remain trapped in a specific phase of growth or continue to evolve over time.

While basic access to clean water is critical, another important issue is the affordability of water access for people around the globe. Prior international work has highlighted that a large proportion of consumers could not afford water if priced at full cost recovery levels. Given growing concern about affordability issues due to rising water rates, and a comparative lack of work on affordability in the developed world, as compared to the developing world, more work is needed in developed countries to understand the extent of this issue in terms of the number of households and persons impacted. To address this need, this paper assesses potential affordability issues for households in the United States using the U.S. EPA’s 4.5% affordability criteria for combined water and wastewater services. Analytical results from this paper highlight high-risk and at-risk households for water poverty or unaffordable water services. Many of these households are clustered in pockets of water poverty within counties, which is a concern for individual utility providers servicing a large proportion of customers with a financial inability to pay for water services. Results also highlight that while water rates remain comparatively affordable for many U.S. households, this trend will not continue in the future. If water rates rise at projected amounts over the next five years, conservative projections estimate that the percentage of U.S. households who will find water bills unaffordable could triple from 11.9% to 35.6%. This is a concern due to the cascading economic impacts associated with widespread affordability issues; these issues mean that utility providers could have fewer customers over which to spread the large fixed costs of water service. Unaffordable water bills also impact customers for whom water services are affordable via higher water rates to recover the costs of services that go unpaid by lower income households.

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While the productivity paradox has been largely resolved, debate persists about the impacts of information and communications technologies on productivity, particularly as regards broadband Internet connections. To date, the bulk of the literature has not addressed the impacts of broadband provision on regional variations in productivity. This study develops a series of spatial econometric models that examine the link between broadband provision and productivity for US counties. The models developed not only consider the link between productivity and broadband provision, but they also evaluate the variability in broadband impacts that are related to the quality of human capital stock within counties. The results of the models are evidence of skill-based technological change and suggest that in general, broadband has a positive impact on productivity only in locales with high levels of human capital and/or highly skilled occupations.