Entrepreneurial dynamics and regional growth Marcus Dejardin • Michael Fritsch Accepted: 12 November 2009 / Published online: 20 December 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2009 Abstract We give an overview of the contributions to this special issue and identify topics for further research. The contributions collected in this special issue document considerable advancements in the research about the effects of new business formation on regional development. Differences in these effects are found according to types of start-ups and their regional environment. Future research should try to shed more light on such differences. This particularly requires information about the characteristics of start- ups such as their knowledge intensity as well as their innovativeness and characteristics of their product program. Moreover, future research has to clarify to what extent new business formation is determined by previous or expected growth and to what extent start- ups have an effect on economic growth independent of an already existent development trend. Keywords Entrepreneurship Á New business formation Á Regional development Á Sector-specific effects JEL Classifications L26 Á M13 Á O1 Á O18 Á R11 1 Aims and scope Recent research has clearly demonstrated that new business formation may have considerable positive effects on regional development (for an overview see Fritsch 2008). A main result of this research was that the most important growth effects of start-ups tend to occur with a time lag of up to 10 years. In most of the analyses, a ‘‘wave’’ pattern of the effects has been found. This wave pattern suggests that, in the medium term, new businesses may induce displacements that lead to increased productivity but also to an employment decline. After about 5 or 6 years, the employment effect then becomes positive. An explanation for this long-term employ- ment increase is that additional competition by entries and the subsequent process of market selection result in improvements on the supply side of the regional economy and enhanced competitive- ness. Such supply-side improvements can particu- larly emerge from a reallocation of resources within and between industries and sectors. The empirical M. Dejardin Faculty of Economics, Social Sciences and Business Administration, FUNDP-University of Namur and Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 8, Rempart de la Vierge, 5000 Namur, Belgium e-mail: marcus.dejardin@fundp.ac.be M. Fritsch (&) Chair of Business Dynamics, Innovation, and Economic Change, School of Economics and Business Administration, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Carl-Zeiss-Str. 3, 07743 Jena, Germany e-mail: m.fritsch@uni-jena.de 123 Small Bus Econ (2011) 36:377–382 DOI 10.1007/s11187-009-9258-7