The study draws data from three main sources. The first is the Feldman-Lowe database, a proprietary database of entrepreneurial firms housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Feldman & Lowe, 2015). The study relies on eight fields from the database:
company name, additional names, company addresses, entry type, entry location, date established, company description, and total founders. Company name is the name of the company at its founding. The additional names field includes all other names the company has gone by throughout its life. The company addresses field includes common addresses the
company has used in its life. Entry type is an exhaustive and mutually exclusive drop-down field, and can be used to identify entrepreneurial firms (as “entrepreneurial start-up”) from other types of firms or establishments in the database (e.g. de novo branch plants, entrepreneurial
relocations, joint partnerships).32 Entry location is also an exhaustive and mutually exclusive
drop-down field. For entrepreneurial firms, entry location records where a firm was located when it was founded. There are three options in this field: the 13-County Triangle Region, Other North Carolina, and Outside North Carolina.33 The date established field features a calendar, recording
the firm’s earliest known date of existence. The company description field allows unlimited text. Here, researchers enter information related to company history, past and current business
activities, product development, changes in company strategies, etc. Finally, the total founders field is a sum of the total number of founders associated with each entrepreneurial startup.
As outlined in Feldman & Lowe (2015), the data in this database is the culmination of a multi-year and continuous data collection effort. Firms are identified from a variety of sources, including publications or lists of companies provided by universities and incubators, shared data
32 The options in this drop down are exhaustive and mutually exclusive. Entrepreneurial start-up is amongst the most commonly used selections.
33 The Outside North Carolina option is rarely used, and is for out of state entrepreneurial firms that have some links to North Carolina. For example, the larger research project tracks “serial entrepreneurs” who founded multiple companies. If one of these entrepreneurs founds multiple companies in North Carolina but one outside of the state, that latter firm would be included in the
from local quasi-public or non-profit organizations (e.g., North Carolina Biotech Center and the Council for Entrepreneurial Development), newspaper articles, interviews, etc. Data is identified from multiple sources; examples of these sources include LinkedIn, in-person interviews,
Secretary of State filings, patent filings, incubator tenant lists, technology transfer office filings, and membership or event attendance lists from local entrepreneurial and industry organizations.
The majority of the database’s bioscience firms are engaged in traditional life science, pharmaceutical, or medical device activities, including early to mid-stage drug development, drug commercialization, contract research, medical device development, and drug and device manufacturing. However, this industry also includes companies that engage in less traditional but supportive activities, including the development of drug management software and specialized law and consulting.34 Including this wide range of firms is a more holistic approach than one
based on using industrial codes (e.g., NAICS) to define an industry, and an accurate representation of the region’s entrepreneurial environment of bioscience start-up firms.
The second data source is the 2013 North Carolina NETS database, a private
establishment-based database. This database contains records for all establishments located in the state of North Carolina at any point between 1989 and 2012. The study uses 1991 to 2010 data from three of the 13 files that comprise this database: the first address file, the move summary file, and the employment file. The first address file provides both the company name and the establishment’s first known street addresses. The move summary file provides a record of every major move the establishment made in the time period. The employment file provides the yearly
employment count for an establishment. All files have a DUNS number to link establishment records together.
The study also uses 20 yearly establishment-level QCEW records (1991-2010) provided by North Carolina’s Department of Commerce. Each file contains a company legal name, a company DBA name (for “does business as”), the year’s monthly employment counts, and quarterly addresses. In some years, each establishment listed in the QCEW has two addresses: physical address and mailing address. In other years, establishments have a third address: unemployment insurance address.
Finally, while the Feldman-Lowe database contains information on entrepreneurial companies or firms, each of the two secondary databases is establishment-based. The two terms are distinct; an establishment refers to a single physical location of a business unit, and a firm (or company) is often comprised of multiple establishments. However, since this study only
considers the first location, employment levels, and founding date of an entrepreneurial firm, the firm is equivalent to the firm’s single, original establishment. Following Neumark et al. (2005), I use the terms business and establishment interchangeably, and use firm and company to refer to the larger (and potentially multi-establishment) entities.