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Abstract: For many years, entrepreneurship, more specifically the formation of tech startups, has often been attributed with economic growth and job creation due to their high-growth potential by policy makers. Still, this link is widely debated in scientific literature, which does not necessarily seem to inform public policy. This paper outlines how entrepreneurship policy stakeholders and the institutional arrangements of entrepreneurship in Hamburg, Germany, represent a selfperpetuating discourse of domination. It is based on sociotechnical imaginaries that sustain their power, position and privilege via the accumulation, display and deployment of capitals. This discourse is an "unreal reality" that this paper seeks to unpack to unmask. The author will introduce a critical discourse analysis and ethnographic methodology approach to uncover and identify the sociotechnical imaginaries inherent in the stakeholders' discourse that fuel the creation of misguided or even counterproductive public policy towards innovation and high-growth entrepreneurship in Hamburg, Germany.
Keywords: sociotechnical imaginaries, entrepreneurship, metrification, entrepreneurship policy, policy discourse, discourse analysis
1. Introduction
In 2000 the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor established an empirical link between entrepreneurial activity and economic growth at the country level (Reynolds et al., 2001). However, research reveals that high-growth entrepreneurship disproportionately affects innovative change and economic growth (Autio, 2005; Henrekson & Johansson, 2009; Stam et al., 2009), while other forms of entrepreneurship do not. Most small firms do not grow (Anderson & Ullah, 2017), or do so only very slowly, while a few high-growth ventures are responsible for job creation (Ács & Mueller, 2008). Despite the importance of high-growth ventures for economic growth being substantiated in empirical research and the intention to foster high-growth ventures is commonplace among policy makers, only very few public policy agendas target them explicitly or exclusively (Autio et al., 2007), a strategy proposed by Shane (2009). The city of Hamburg, like many public policy agendas across the western world, adopts and promotes policies of entrepreneurship (Gilbert et al., 2004).
This paper argues that, while public policy measures in Hamburg do mention the relevance of high-growth ventures for economic growth, they still focus on generally increasing the number of startups. Moreover, this is done while remaining vague about the entailed definitions for terms like startup and innovation and providing very limited metrics to practically measure the impact of the...