Embeddedness or Over-Embeddedness? Women Entrepreneurs’ Networks and Their Influence on Business Performance

The The Role of Proximity in Resources Exchanged by Incubatees of Biopartner Center Leiden, the Netherlands

“…Social proximity consists of "embedded, trust-based interaction between actors" (Boschma, 2005, p. 64), and geographical proximity refers to the spatial distance between two parties. In response to Boschma's plea for more empirical research to isolate the effects of these different dimensions of proximity, Parrino (2015) studied spatial aspects of knowledge flows in two contrasting coworker spaces and concluded that collaborations and relationships are rarely created in the absence of an organisational structure supporting other forms of proximity. In other words, co-location itself seems insufficient for interaction between co-workers.…”

“…For incubator-internal relationships, however, this study adopts a more small-scale geographical notion: "within-incubator site proximity" (or just "site proximity"), referring to the relative physical distance between two incubatees, such as whether they are located in the same incubator building or on the same floor. Site proximity between two firms at the micro-scale of an incubator seems to facilitate collaboration as well, without being necessary or sufficient per se (Parrino, 2015). Proximity, then, simply increases the frequency of contacts and, as such, helps incubatees build and maintain networks.…”

“…As such, it has been assumed that as a result of spatial proximity among firms, a thematic geographical cluster stimulates collabo-ration and innovation (McCann and Folta, 2011;Katz et al, 2015). However, there is evidence that even in micro-scale settings specifically developed to foster inter-firm networks, such as university business incubators (UBIs), professional relationships between firms do not develop automatically or easily (Cooper et al ., 2012;Fuzi, 2015;Parrino, 2015). Furthermore, it seems that even when business relationships do develop, firms rarely exchange valuable resources with various parties (Soetanto and Jack, 2011) and seldom formalise their collaborations (McAdam and Marlow, 2008).…”

“…It remains unclear why many business networks among incubatees, located at close physical proximity in an incubator, are small (Parrino, 2015) and, in particular, why resource exchange is rare. To form inter-firm linkages and actually exchange resources, firms must be aware of other incubatees' presence and activities, must be in need of the resources they might exchange (Redondo-Carreto and Camarero-Izquiedo, 2017), and must have easy access to other firms.…”

“…Second, as we apply his ideas to the value of spatial proximity to resource exchange in business relationships at the micro-level of an incubator setting, we also add to the literature on incubator configurations (see Hackett and Dilts, 2004). This literature entails the drivers of the mere existence of inter-firm relationships Cooper et al, 2012) and of knowledge exchange and interactions in specific coworking spaces (Parrino, 2015;Fuzi, 2015), incubators (Redondo-Carretero and Camarero-Izquierdo, 2017) or a specific company division (Usman et al ., 2019). However, whereas the latter scholars qualitatively investigated business relationships, this paper adapts quantitative methods to investigate whether spatial proximity and similarity between two business partners relate to the types of resources ex-changed in business relationships.…”