Entrepreneurial opportunity and related specialization in economic ecosystems

Entrepreneurial ecosystems are most often defined as locally bounded networks of institutions and individuals that help entrepreneurs to identify and exploit market opportunities. However, a prerequisite of the ability to exploit an entrepreneurial opportunity is the existence of the opportunity to begin with. In this paper, we propose an approach to representing how entrepreneurial opportunities are embedded in a regional economy. The central methodological contribution of our paper is to introduce the concept of related specialization, which we define as the concentration of high interdependencies between specialized industries within a metropolitan region, relative to the national level of concentration. We find that related specialization is positively correlated with entrepreneurial outcomes across U.S. metropolitan areas. We use related specialization to make a first attempt at representing the trophic structure of an economic ecosystem. In a biological ecosystem, the trophic structure refers to energy-transfer relationships between different species. As introduced in this paper, we propose the analogy that, in an economic ecosystem, the trophic structure may be mapped in terms of the supply-chain relationships between industries within a region. We argue that these analytic tools can help policymakers more readily understand the opportunities that are imminently available to entrepreneurs in their local environments.