Entrepreneurship in regional economic development: some methodological applications A mini-special edition of papers: the annals of regional science

Considerable interest has emerged in the field of regional science regarding the role of entrepreneurship in regional economic development and policy. This is witnessed by a steadily increasing set of publications on this fascinating issue or related topics including, for example, Acs et al. (2006), Acs and Armington (2006), Audretsch and Keilbach (2005), De Groot et al. (2004), Fritsch (1997), Johansson et al. (2006), Karlsson et al. (2006), McQuaid (1996), Yu and Stough (2006). With this new development there has been a variety of attempts to measure and model entrepreneurship in an effort to examine it in the context of regional economic development and innovation (Audretsch and Keilbach 2005, De Groot et al. 2004). However, the methodological and contextual scope has been limited mostly to various regression techniques, and advanced econometric and spatial econometric modeling efforts. This small but focused special edition is designed and aimed to explore, illustrate and demonstrate a broader application of methods and further to examine entrepreneurship in the context of broader territorial, network and endogenous contexts. While entrepreneurship has been a new and dynamic focus of regional analysts, interest in it has emerged in a broader theoretical context driven by recent changes in economic growth theory, namely endogenous theory. The endogenous perspective in a regional context focuses attention on the fact that local effort is one of the determinative factors in the performance of a regional economy. While this notion may have been lost or at least de-emphasized by theoretical economists during the last half of the twentieth century, the formulation of endogenous growth theory (Romer 1986) brought back recognition that local resources and their deployment in a market