HOW IMPORTANT IS GEOGRAPHY FOR THE ENTREPRENEURIAL PROFILE

The studies of entrepreneurs is gaining more and more interest among academic researchers within different disciplines and among policymakers as new firms are recognised as important for job creation, productivity increasement, and competition enhancement. The many studies of the (successful) entrepreneurial profile can to some extent be categorised into identity (e.g. traits and values), knowledge (e.g. education and work experience) or network (e.g. strong and weak ties) studies: using the three categories of means terminology introduced by Sarasvathy (2008). The research question being addressed in this paper is: How does place affect the entrepreneurial profile? Much of the literature points out that the entrepreneurial dynamics in the rural and urban areas are quite different because of agglomeration effects and the creative profile of the residents. Yet, few try to link the studies focusing on individuals with studies focusing on environments (Thornton, 1999). To the authors knowledge this is the first study trying to combine the entrepreneur s three categories of means with geography. Learning about the answer to this question could be important for improving entrepreneurship policy and education, and for understanding the entrepreneur and how an entrepreneur is created. Differences between the entrepreneur s three categories of means, as outlined above, are studied comparing rural and urban entrepreneurs. Identity indicators encompasses personal traits often associated with entrepreneurs (e.g. risk taking ability, tolerance of ambiguity, creativity/innovativeness, feelings about locus of control, need for achievement, and desire for autonomy), work values (intrinsic and extrinsic work values: the latter being related to the convenience, financial, coworker, and career dimension), and, finally, work involvement (value-orientation towards work and possible work-family conflict). Network indicators encompasses the use of strong ties, weak ties, and professionals, contact frequency and contact willingness to weak ties and knowledge of (former) entrepreneurs among strong and weak ties. Knowledge indicators are approximated by age, education level, work experience, and entrepreneurial experience. The data used is register data from IDA (Integrated Database for Labour Market Research) combined with data from a questionnaire survey conducted on Danish entrepreneurs and wage earners in 2008. IDA contains longitudinal data on the entire Danish population and the Danish firms in the period 1980 onwards and each self-employed person or employee can be connected to the firm they worked for in any specific year. IDA is used to provide background information about the respondents from the survey and also for creating indicators for knowledge. The questionnaire is used to create the above indicators for identity and networks. The survey allows for utilisation of responses from 1.446 first-time entrepreneurs in 2004: an entrepreneur being defined as someone who started a full-time business with real activity. Furthermore, it is possible to include a control group of 621 respondents that have never been entrepreneurs. The definition of an urban inhabitant is defined as a person living in a municipality with more than 250.000 inhabitants or living in the surrounding municipalities within commuting distance. This definition results in two metropolitan areas in Denmark being the Copenhagen and Aarhus area. In contrast, a rural inhabitant is defined as a person living in a municipality