Defining the Innovation Space: Measuring Entrepreneurial Opportunity Embedded in Regional Job Flows

Sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
All documents contained herein are for discussion purposes and are not to be used without permission from the Kauffman Foundation or CRA

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” —Lord Kelvin

Entrepreneurs innovate solutions to social and economic problems by identifying opportunities, appropriating resources, organizing teams, and developing new capabilities. Productive entrepreneurship in particular helps build local capabilities and improve the social well-being of its community. Consequently, policymakers have long been interested in creating enabling business environments that support healthy regional economic growth. However, standardized measures of regional entrepreneurial vibrancy have remained largely elusive partly because of the heterogeneous character of regions and the complexity of actors and activities that comprise regional innovation systems. To address this gap, we adopt an entrepreneurial ecosystems approach to regional development and map metrics to theory. We assess both the structure and sources of entrepreneurial opportunity embedded in the dynamics of regional economic systems by developing two novel tools for measuring Entrepreneurial Ecosystems.

  1. Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Indicators – We assess the Density, Fluidity, Connectivity, and Diversity of the ecosystem to identify the structure and vibrancy of regional entrepreneurship.
  2. Map of the Regional Innovation Space – We construct a “map” illustrating the knowledge networks embedded in the region’s high-skilled occupations.

This project will apply these novel approaches to the six U.S. metropolitan areas of; Albuquerque, NM; Burlington, VT; Kansas City, KS-MO; Nashville, TN; Santa Fe, NM; and, Washington, D.C.

1. Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Indicators
Charts for All Areas
Albuquerque, NM MSA
Burlington, VT MSA
Kansas City, KS-MO MSA
Nashville, TN MSA
Santa Fe, NM MSA
Washington, D.C. MSA