EAGER: PBI: Benchmarking the Impact of Regional Engines on Regional Start-Up Ecosystems

Nontechnical Description. Measuring regional entrepreneurship is important but difficult due to an absence of data and the long-term nature of entrepreneurship outcomes. The authors develop a novel measurement approach that enables the benchmarking of regional entrepreneurship at different levels of industry and time granularity. To do so, they update their prior project, the Startup Cartography Project, to also include industry measures and a variety of outcomes important for regional development. The result dataset and approach should enable a comprehensive assessment of regional innovation and entrepreneurship by policymakers and academics alike.

Technical Description. The authors develop a predictive analytic approach that uses information available in business registration data and ex-post outcomes to measure the quality and potential of firms. Building on their prior work in the Startup Cartography Project, they match this data to new industry-specific and general outcomes (such as venture capital and employment), to develop surrogate regional indexes that are comparable across space and time. In doing so, they create a new way to benchmark regional ecosystems and observe their growth over time, as well as a public dataset that permits their development.