Resumo

The term entrepreneurial city, until the 2000s, was associated with local administration efforts to improve economic development. With the popularity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept, academics began to emphasize the role of local conditions and factors, especially in large urban areas, as drivers of entrepreneurial activity. In this context, studies on entrepreneurial cities aim to identify the conditions that led to entrepreneurship both in large and small cities, as well as in peripheral regions of metropolitan areas.

Most studies on entrepreneurial city configurations deal with developed contexts. There are few studies that address the Brazilian context, i.e., what conditions are necessary for entrepreneurship in Brazilian cities. The purpose of this research is threefold. First, we seek to identify what entrepreneurial cities' factors are necessary conditions for innovative entrepreneurship. Second, we aim to identify which cities are similar in terms of entrepreneurial performance. Third, we scrutinize the level of necessity of each condition to obtain different entrepreneurial output levels.

Assessing entrepreneurial ecosystems at the city level, is increasingly relevant, as entrepreneurship is the result of local conditions (Bosma & Sternberg, 2014). Factors such as proximity to large metropolitan areas, presence of SMEs and large companies, industry specialization, mobility of human capital, infrastructure and local amenities are listed by the entrepreneurial cities literature as predictors of entrepreneurship (Liu, Qian, & Haynes, 2021; Long et al., 2022; Roundy, 2017).

This study was designed into three stages. First, we seek to identify the necessary conditions for innovative entrepreneurship to take place in Brazilian cities. Then, a cluster analysis grouped the cities into three sets according to their efforts entrepreneurial patterns. Our data on cities comes from the ENAP’s Entrepreneurial Cities Index. We collected data from 13 variables that represent the contextual factors of entrepreneurship and one variable that measures innovative entrepreneurial performance.

Our results showed that infrastructure, economic development, access to financial capital, education, culture, and innovation inputs are necessary conditions for innovative entrepreneurship. In addition, we also identified the levels of need for each condition to obtain certain levels of entrepreneurial outputs. Some necessary conditions require less performance than others, so policymakers should consider allocating policy efforts to strengthen conditions that maximize entrepreneurial innovation levels.

We show that even if a condition is necessary for entrepreneurship, i.e., it is a predictor of entrepreneurship, this condition presents different levels of need for different output levels. Thus, even if a condition is required, in many cases that condition does not need to score maximum for an outcome to occur. In this sense, policymakers should prioritize comparative analysis with peer cities, i.e., belonging to the same group, to identify conditions that maximize entrepreneurial outputs, rather than conditions that, for certain levels of outputs, are not necessary for entrepreneurship.

Liu, S., Qian, H., & Haynes, K. E. (2021). Entrepreneurship in Small Cities: Evidence From U.S. Micropolitan Areas. Economic Development Quarterly, 35(1), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891242420941927 Long, F., Zheng, L., & Qian, H. (2022). Entrepreneurship in China’s peripheral regions. The Annals of Regional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-022-01122-0 Roundy, P. T. (2017). “Small town” entrepreneurial ecosystems. Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, 9(3), 238–262. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEEE-09-2016-0040