Economic resilience and entrepreneurship: lessons from the Sheffield City Region

TLDR

Resilience is an emerging concept used to assess economic performance and responsiveness to exogenous shocks such as financial crises and recessions. The article investigates how entrepreneurship underpins economic resilience in city regions, develops a conceptual framework linking the two, and argues that entrepreneurship is central to sustaining a dynamic economy and is foregrounded in policy debates. The authors conduct a literature review of academic work and interview policy‑makers in the Sheffield City Region, using these data to construct the conceptual framework. They find that entrepreneurship drives diversification and capacity building—traits of resilient economies—and is essential for restructuring and adapting local economies, prompting policy recommendations.

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between economic resilience and entrepreneurship in city regions. Resilience is an emerging concept which has been employed to examine economic performance and responsiveness to exogenous shocks such as financial crisis and recession. Drawing on a literature review of academic articles in this emerging field and interviews with policy-makers in the Sheffield City Region of England, the article examines how entrepreneurship is central to sustain a dynamic economy and demonstrates that it is being fore-fronted in policy debates as a key aspect in creating more resilient economies. The article finds that entrepreneurship is integral to promoting the diversification and capacity building of regional economies, traits which are characteristic of (more) resilient economies. We advance the emerging literature through the development of a conceptual framework to highlight the links between economic resilience and entrepreneurship. In doing so, the article argues that entrepreneurship is critical to the restructuring and adaptation of local (city region) economies and draws out a series of recommendations concerning the wider policy implications of the study.