The main aim of this paper is to investigate if and to what extent entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) have an impact on economic resilience at local level. The paper is based on a quantitative analysis for the Italian provinces (NUT-3 level) and presents two novelties: first, it provides a composite index of EE at local level by capturing the different aspects encompassing political, social, cultural and economic dimensions of an EE; second, it analyzes the role of EE in terms of resistance to and recovery from external shocks. The empirical results show that EE has a relevant role in explaining the resilience of local systems to economic shocks. The positive effect also remains when controlling for the direct impact of new firm formation, thus highlighting that the EE concept has a greater significance for characterizing resilience and entrepreneurial activity at local level than entrepreneurial rates.

A large body of the literature showed that related variety at local level is more relevant than unrelated variety for explaining the innovation performance of firms. Knowledge relatedness is usually measured by considering activities within the same industry (i.e. the same two-digit code) while activities in different industries are associated with unrelated variety. This approach is challenged by the increasing relevance of transversal technologies, i.e. technologies that are developed and applied in rather different sectors. As a result, between industry variety (i.e. unrelated variety) is expected to be more important than within industry variety (i.e. related variety). We test this hypothesis by examining the innovation activities of firms in the textile and clothing industry. The innovation model of these firms is characterized by low investment in R&D, little capabilities for autonomous innovation and dependence from knowledge suppliers belonging to different sectors. The empirical analysis, carried out over the 1996–2014 period at the EU NUTS2 level, shows that between industry variety has a greater impact than within industry variety for the innovative performance of firms.