Geographical media reputation and technology entrepreneurship

Purpose - Geographical location has been of noted importance for technology entrepreneurship, i.e. technology clusters. While social resources have been investigated as strategic in management literature, media reputation appears to be an overlooked reason why technological entrepreneurship has been less prevalent in some geographical locations, despite there being fertile economic parameters. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - Utilizing methodology developed by Rindovaet al.to explore how media (local and foreign) describes technological entrepreneurship (local and foreign), the paper compares Boston, MA and Kolkata, India in terms of positive or negative valenced recognition and explores their relation to technology entrepreneurship location. Findings - Geographical media reputation is contextualized and does not transfer readily. Unlike the absolute positives of economic reasoning, positive media reputation in the local context does not scale globally. Also, negative reputation is very hard to overturn at the global level. Social resources often have their own social dynamics that are localized in culture and environment. Research limitations/implications - This paper is an exploratory, illustrative analysis of the relation between geographical reputation at local and global levels and the location choice of technology entrepreneurship. Other factors do exist that the paper does not examine specifically but tries to match through sample selection, realizing no two geographical locations can ever be exact matches and in this case are rough equivalents. Originality/value - Geographical location imputes social resources – namely media reputation – that can affect the location choice of technology entrepreneurship beyond economic considerations.