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The article investigates whether the history of individuals' spatial relocation has an impact on their propensity to perform an entrepreneurial entry and post-entry performance of firms they start. By looking at entrepreneurs in the IT services sector in Swedish non-core regions between 1991 and 2010, the article investigates the interaction between individuals' embeddedness in local networks and their exposure to external knowledge accumulation opportunities across different geographical settings, as well as its impact on their entrepreneurial activities. The results of the analysis suggest that individuals with broad spatial relocation histories are more likely to start IT firms in non-core regions, which, in turn, may be expected to survive longer. It is, therefore, claimed that non-local knowledge accumulated through spatial relocation is an important complement to embeddedness in local networks in noncore regions. This complementarity is further related to the evolution of the IT services sector over time.

We challenge the currently dominating static view of inter‐industry relatedness by investigating the evolution of relatedness linkages between Swedish industries during five sub‐periods between 1991 and 2010. Distinguishing between stable ties (present in all sub‐periods) and non‐stable ties (e.g. emerging, disappearing, etc.), we demonstrate that inter‐industry relatedness linkages change considerably over time. Furthermore, we show that these changes matter for how the co‐location of related industries (related variety) influences regional employment growth – to generate growth the type of local related ties should match with the regional setting. We suggest that, at least partly, the impact of emerging, stable and disappearing ties differs since complementarity potential between related industries becomes depleted over time. In other words, relatedness linkages have a ‘best before date’.

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