Pierre Fournie (p)

Christian Bergholz

Moving a capital city never can be considered as a trivial act. Even more when the new city has to be created ex-nihilo. In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) announced on August 16, 2019, his decision to transfer the "Mother City" or "Ibu-Kota" to the island of Kalimantan (Borneo). The congestion of the capital city (1), the intense and regular flooding of Jakarta (2), the absence of volcanoes (3) support the choice. This highly political decision also covers strategic, economic and social considerations. A time delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the bill presented to parliament in September 2021 reinvigorates the presidential vision, sets 2024 as the completion date and establishes at 489 trillion Indonesian rupees (approximately 46.31 billion USD) the budget for transfer. The abandonment of Jakarta foreshadows a real reconfiguration of the national territory. The current paper intends, after looking at how Indonesia proceeds to bring into the “digitalization map” its “outer islands”, to focus on Nusantara, as the “capital to be build” will be called. Located in the third largest island in the world, lightly populated, with limited available local competences on information technology, networks and energy supply to be developed (4), it constitutes an “extreme case study” on how digitalization can be conducted.

Eristian Wibisono (p)

Pierre Fournie

Although the digital entrepreneurship ecosystem concept has evolved in recent years, empirical research evidence by measurement can still be developed. When discussing the entrepreneurial ecosystem in a digital platform-based ecosystem, it is absolutely essential to include a massive global digital community. Unfortunately, the issue of European platformization arises commonly since their role in the global digital entrepreneurship ecosystem was insufficient. This paper aims to explore the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem in European Union countries. We selected three major countries, Germany, France, and Austria, and analyzed all three countries' Digital Platform Economy indexes to investigate the digital entrepreneurial ecosystems' development further. According to our preliminary research, France and Austria need more effort than Germany to improve the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem. However, we also observe the French digital entrepreneurial ecosystem that may establish its position in the future, despite the economy in the other two countries being one step ahead. Our study contributes to the body of knowledge in entrepreneurship, digitalization, and the recently emerging digital platform economy. It highlights platform issues in European Union countries by considering ways to balance the digital ecosystem and entrepreneurship ecosystem in the future.

Johannes Bersch, Christian Bergholz, Lena Füner, Moritz Lubczyk, Rolf Sternberg (p)

Eristian Wibisono

Entrepreneurship is mainly interpreted "as an urban event" (Bosma/Sternberg 2014). However, digital entrepreneurship shows that some new ventures become less dependent on physical inputs and more reliant on digital skills. Hence, the relative importance of spatial characteristics for new venture emergence and success has changed. The increase in new firms’ digital skill intensity implies that new firms’ location choice may become less constrained by the proximate availability of production factors and more indicative of their founders’ wishes: the location preferences of the entrepreneurially prone and highly skilled. Little evidence exists on how digital entrepreneurship and founders’ location preferences impact the urban-rural divide in firm foundation patterns.
In this paper, we provide a first empirical assessment of the spatial distribution of digital entrepreneurship and its determinants. Combining information on regional characteristics with unique firm-level micro data from Germany, we address four research questions. First, we compare the spatial distribution of digital entrepreneurship in Germany to that of non-digital entrepreneurship. Second, we analyse whether founders of new digital ventures are more likely to start their firms in rural regions when these regions improve their digital infrastructure. Third, we investigate whether increases in the attractiveness of rural regions as affordable and ecologically favourable habitats for highly skilled individuals also apply to firm founders and whether this effect differs by founder age. Fourth, we investigate whether the quality and quantity of digital infrastructure in rural and urban regions influences the location patterns of digital entrepreneurship.
Our empirical paper is conceptually rooted in arguments derived from the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, classical agglomeration theory and Autio et al.'s (2018) idea of digital affordances (including decoupling, disintermediation, and generativity).
We intend to contribute to three highly relevant areas of research. First, we provide a fresh look into the location preferences of highly skilled and entrepreneurially prone individuals, now during digitalization. Second, we analyze whether digitalization has changed the urban-rural divide in knowledge-intensive start-ups and their founders. Finally, we focus our empirical analyses on the spatiality of these new ventures which we identify using a new definition based on industry classifications and products that are, to a considerable extent, digital. We test whether digital entrepreneurship could occur less frequently in urban agglomerations than other types of entrepreneurship.

This abstract is based on research done in the ongoing research project "EntreLR" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Grant Number 2821LE003