Going Viral or Growing Like an Oak Tree? Towards Sustainable Local Development Through Entrepreneurship

Nurturing venture-capital-backed, high-growth entrepreneurship has been strongly promoted as an effective means to achieve local development in impoverished places.Yet growing evidence suggests that, despite its notable successes in resource-rich regions, this approach creates limited impact in economically challenged locales.We address this conundrum by calling into question the crux of high-growth entrepreneurshipthe pursuit of quick scaling through venture capital financing.Our field research in two entrepreneurship-nurturing organizations in Detroit reveals important heterogeneity in resourcing modes and venture growth in time and space.Specifically, we find that ventures developed through different modes of resourcing (financing vs. local bricolage) grow at different spatiotemporal scales (scaling up towards fast geographical expansion vs. scaling deep towards locally anchored endurance), and consequently generate distinctive yet complementary contributions to their depleted place of origin.Unlike scaling-up ventures whose local impact was explosive yet short-lived, scaling-deep ventures created jobs, products/services, and spillover effects that stayed local and addressed specific local problems.Building on these findings, we challenge the exclusive pursuit of high-growth entrepreneurship for poverty alleviation and suggest that entrepreneurship-driven local development requires cohabitation of ventures growing at varying scales.In response to rising inequality between regions and economic polarization around the world, there has been a growing emphasis on local and regional development, defined as "the establishment of conditions and institutions that foster the realization of the potential of the capacities and faculties of the human mind in people, communities and ... places" (Pike, Rodríguez-Pose, & Tomaney, 2007: 1263).And recently, there has been an increasing attention to socially and ecologically sustainable local development, which not only produces economic growth but also enhances social inclusion, cultural diversity, and environmental sustainability across generations (Pike et al., 2007(Pike et al., , 2016)).As a powerful means of addressing the urgent demands of local development, entrepreneurship has been strongly promoted (Sutter, Bruton, & Chen, 2019).In places ranging from decaying urban centers in post-industrial cities to impoverished regions in developing countries, numerous entrepreneurial initiatives have been implemented in the hope of creating high-growth entrepreneurship that has propelled local * Time from incubation/acceleration: major event related to spatial expansion ** Time to expand to markets beyond Detroit; "0" denotes firms that started serving customers outside Detroit during incubation/acceleration period