Traversing the multiple nested geographies of NUTs based entrepreneurial ecosystems

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) have quickly become a key lens for exploring regional entrepreneurial phenomena. Thus far there appears little consensus around the most relevant geographical unit of analysis for examining EEs however, both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. In this paper, we set out to test whether wider EE geographical units (such as UK regions) have any meaningful relevance to the small firms and their business operations. To address this concern this paper undertakes an empirical analysis of a loan guarantee scheme in the UK, the Recovery Loan Scheme (RLS). Through the empirical lens of the UK SME support scheme, the RLS, we test the relevance of different levels of EE geographical units including NUTS 1, NUTS 2 and NUTS 3. In the case of the UK, which is a diverse collection of nations (England, and three devolved nations, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland), we found that the three devolved nations, and also London shows much larger and stronger higher order spatial effects on their lower order constituent spatial levels. This suggests that outside of London, and the devolved nations, simply analysing NUTS 1 regions does not appear to be the appropriate level if we want to understand the inherent spatial dynamics of small firm ecosystems. Rather, we need to go to smaller spatial levels to establish the true nature of the ecosystem relevant to the small firm. The policy implications point toward the need for properly tailored and localised policy formulation.