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Entrepreneurs can be better understood within the institutional and social contexts in which they operate and collaborate. Context is perhaps most easily captured by considering the spatial scale, which serves as a platform for organizing the institutions, organizations, and resources that provide entrepreneurs with opportunities but also set the boundaries that delineate their actions. Context can alternatively be an asset or a liability for entrepreneurship, assisting the processes of new firm formation, addressing information asymmetries to help diffuse good ideas, or facilitating a fast failure of ideas with little promise.

On balance, the consensus has emerged that geographic context is important for the formation and success of entrepreneurial endeavors (Delgado, Porter, & Stern, 2010; Glaeser & Kerr, 2009; Mueller, 2006). Certainly, this is part of the lore of Silicon Valley—the existence of a finely tuned set of organizations and institutions that promoted opportunity and economic growth (Bahrami & Evans, 1995; Kenney & von Burg, 1999; Saxenian, 1994). The importance of location has been demonstrated to hold in other successful places through rich case studies (see, eg, Walshok, Furtek, Lee, & Windham, 2002, on San Diego). Resource-rich environments, known more formally as agglomerations, especially aid small firms that lack the resources of their larger counterparts and benefit greatly from easy access to resources as well as knowledge spillovers that are geographically mediated. Yet, the idea of knowledge spillovers, although theoretically powerful, lacks precision and a tangible manifestation that is amenable to policy interventions for the …