Entrepreneurial activity is profoundly shaped by the micro-geographies in which it unfolds. Recent research shows that neighborhoods are not merely backdrops for entrepreneurial action—they actively structure opportunities, inequalities, and the long-term sustainability of entrepreneurial ecosystems. This keynote integrates insights from strategy, economic geography, and urban studies to illustrate how entrepreneurial clusters arise unevenly across micro-locations, generating dense concentrations of talent, amenities, and investment, while also producing new forms of exclusion, displacement, and spatial inequality. Throughout the keynote, I will examine how neighborhood-level social and economic dynamics shape the processes through which entrepreneurial activity emerges, develops, and interacts with its local environment—and how actors embedded in these contexts make decisions by interpreting and responding to micro-geographic signals. These signals influence how they adjust their strategies, reallocate attention and resources, and modify the timing, scale, or location of their actions. Together, these decision-making processes play a critical role in steering the evolution, resilience, and spatial organization of urban entrepreneurial ecosystems, ultimately determining which places thrive, which lag behind, and how cities evolve as centers of innovation.
The full presentation is available on Youtube: LINK