A Spatial Analysis of Tourism, Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in North Carolina, USA

Abstract

In light of the projected long-term national economic trends, the vulnerability of rural regions, and the difficulty of small businesses to stay solvent, it is imperative to understand the critical elements within a small business' operating environment or "ecosystem" that support or thwart entrepreneurial activity. Using the 100 counties of North Carolina as a case study, the purpose of this research project was to determine which entrepreneurial ecosystem elements (E3) have the most influence on tourism and entrepreneurship, to identify spatial patterns in this relationship, as well as the extent to which entrepreneurial and tourist activity overlap regionally. Using national secondary data sources, the authors identified that the interaction of entrepreneurship with the proportion of those employed in the creative class is strongly associated with the growth in the number of new establishments and employment, particularly in those rural counties endowed with attractive outdoor amenities.

Human capital in the entrepreneurship ecosystem

“…Since 2010, when Isenberg launched the entrepreneurship ecosystem analytical framework, scholars have focused on exploring its constituents. Researchers have studied regional ecosystems, emphasising local findings and environmental impact in Canada (Spigel, 2015), the Netherlands (Stam, 2014), Latin America (Kantis and Federico, 2012), Saudi Arabia (Rahatullah Khan, 2013), Chile (Chandra and Medrano Silva, 2012), Brazil (Arruda et al, 2013), Asia and the Baltic region (Kshetri, 2014), the USA (Hechavarria and Ingram, 2014;Kline et al, 2014), and Germany (Fuerlinger et al, 2015). Other scholars have related the entrepreneurship ecosystem, for instance, to evolutionary dynamics (Mack and Mayer, 2015), sustainable innovation (Vogel and Fischler-Strasak, 2014), and education (Brush, 2014).…”

“…Mason and Brown (2014, p.5) have explored the meanings and interpretations of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and based on a synthesis of definitions in the literature, define it as "a set of interconnected entrepreneurial actors (both potential and existing), entrepreneurial organisations (e.g., firms, venture capitalists, business angels, banks), institutions (universities, public sector agencies, financial bodies) and entrepreneurial processes (e.g., the business birth rate, numbers of high growth firms, levels of 'blockbuster entrepreneurship', number of serial entrepreneurs, degree of sell-out mentality within firms and levels of entrepreneurial ambition) which formally and informally coalesce to connect, mediate and govern the performance within the local entrepreneurial environment." Kline et al (2014) conceptualise the entrepreneurial ecosystem with elements from rural entrepreneurship, tourism entrepreneurship, as well as regional and local entrepreneurship. They outline three relevant streams in which the elements of the entrepreneurship ecosystem are organised: quality of life and context, governance and leadership, and community culture.…”

“…Extant studies have identified all elements in the current ecosystem-domain thinking as entrepreneurial, for example, the interconnected entrepreneurial actors, organisations and processes (Mason and Brown, 2014). Nevertheless, in most of the ecosystem research, human capital is disregarded, while research focuses on the contextual and institutional aspects of the six possible domains (e.g., Kline, 2014). Moreover, Unger et al (2011) emphasise that knowledge is more important than past experiences.…”

Regional entrepreneurial ecosystems: how family firm embeddedness triggers ecosystem development

“…Empirically, as we want to explore this new yet not established field, our study draws on a qualitative research design (Creswell 2009) with semi-structured interviews. We rely on a set of 20 hospitality family entrepreneurs, who have been previously shown to be relevant actors for investigating EE (Flores et al 2017;Kline et al 2014;Pechlaner et al 2018). Conceptually, we draw on previous embeddedness work (Granovetter 1973;Gulati 1998;Uzzi 1997) and integrate embeddedness into a three dimensional framework.…”

Regionalization Analysis and Mapping for the Source and Sink of Tourist Flows

“…Today, with the big data era approaching, the acquisition of data on tourism flow has become easier. (3) In terms of research methods, traditional statistical analysis [35], spatial analysis [36,37], and gravity models [38] are included. Recently, social network-related data analysis methods, such as the complex network method [39,40] and the GIS spatial interaction method [41,42], have received increasing academic attention.…”