The creation of high-tech ventures in entrepreneurial ecosystems: exploring the interactions among university knowledge, cooperative banks, and individual attitudes

This paper investigates the interplay among three main elements of an entrepreneurial ecosystem: local universities, local financial system, and residents’ individual attitudes. Specifically, we study how the local availability of university knowledge interacts with the relative presence of cooperative banks in the local banking industry and with the residents’ tendency to behave opportunistically to determine the creation of high-tech ventures in a territory (i.e., Italian provinces). Our insight is that high information asymmetries impede high-tech entrepreneurial ideas based on university knowledge to attract external finance. Cooperative banks, which have trust-based relationships with the local community, are potentially a valuable source of finance for these entrepreneurial ideas, but are restrained by their inherent risk aversion. Accordingly, we argue that university knowledge and local presence of cooperative banks can interact either positively or negatively in determining the creation of high-tech ventures at the local level. We also contend that residents’ individual attitudes shape this interaction as trust-based relationships are more valuable in areas where residents tend to behave opportunistically. In the empirical part of the paper, we estimate zero-inflated negative binomial regressions where the dependent variable is the number of new high-tech ventures established in 792 province-industry pairs in the period 2012–2014. In line with our reasoning, we find that in provinces where residents tend to behave opportunistically, the relative presence of cooperative banks magnifies the positive effect of university knowledge on high-tech entrepreneurship. Conversely, this effect is negligible in provinces with less opportunistic residents.