Regional Recipes: A Configurational Analysis of the Regional Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for U.S. Venture Capital-Backed Startups

We examine the relationship between the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem (REE) and the performance of U.S. venture capital (VC)-backed startups. We conceptualize the REE as a complex system and pair a variance decomposition methodology with a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to study the configurations (combinations of regional factors) associated with high levels of performance of nascent early-stage startups and mature late-stage ventures. Our key finding is of an inverse relationship between startup maturity and the combinatorial complexity of regional factors that underlie the REE. Our analyses highlight the conditions under which VC-backed startups benefit most from the resources in the REE, extend prior research on location-based competitive advantages, and demonstrate how regional resource dependencies dynamically shift as a function of the startups’ life cycle.