The Fashioning of Dynamic Competitive Advantage of Entrepreneurial Cities: Role of Social and Political Entrepreneurship

There has been a major change, over the last three decades, in the functions, policy mechanisms, and the spatial forms of many urban regions in the highly industrialized countries in North America and Europe. These transformations reflect these cities’ roles as key actors and sites of change in the contemporaneous process of globalization, and the constituent economic, social and spatial restructuring. The term “Entrepreneurial City” pertains to this emerging urban entity. Lakshmanan and Chatterjee (2003, 2004, 2006; Chatterjee and Lakshmanan 2005a, b) have argued that a variety of change processes have converged in recent years to create a new global environment in which three types of change agents have collaborated to effectuate a major economic and spatial evolution in the form of a global production system and the rise of the entrepreneurial city (Fig. 7.1). Such change processes comprise of three types: (a) multiplicity of knowledge-rich material (transportation, communications and production) technologies and infrastructures which have made economically feasible production systems spanning the globe; (b) the advent of neoliberal ideologies which have spawned many nonmaterial (institutional and organizational) technologies and infrastructure which have dropped institutional barriers to and promoted freer cross-border flows of goods, services, finance and knowledge; and (c) secular economic changes such as the rise of quality competition and demand for variety, and the weakening of earlier macroeconomic management apparatus (e.g., Keynesian). These change processes collectively facilitate a global “space of flows” of goods, services, capital, knowledge and technology, and enable a globally distributed production system. In effect, these three classes of change forces create a new context or stage or arena for action by the economic, political, and social actors of the emerging global system.