Entrepreneurial ecosystems in an interconnected world: emergence, governance and digitalization

Abstract

Achieving and sustaining growth depends on the effective work of multiple and interconnected actors—such as e.g. governments, the private sector, society, universities, entrepreneurs and many others—who build an ecosystem, i.e. a social and economic environment for innovative and entrepreneurial endeavors. The underlying idea is that firms do not just compete with each other through well-developed stand-alone strategies to achieve advantages over their rivals, uniquely relying on their own resources, knowledge, and capabilities, but rather base their business models on shared resources, network externalities, knowledge spill-overs, local endowments, and governmental support. This introductory article offers a wide array of topics, methods and fields of application within the field of entrepreneurial ecosystems as well as a theorizing about potential fruitful future areas of research within the field, concentrating on legitimation and identification processes in ecosystems, possibly culminating towards a meta-identity of the ecosystem.

Gaming innovation ecosystem: actors, roles and co-innovation processes

“…From the output perspective, two types of ecosystems are important due to their impact on technological development, product creation and growth (Bouncken and Kraus 2021): innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. Given the scarcity of empirical findings on innovation ecosystems, they still appear as an emerging concept requiring research (Adner 2017;Dąbrowska et al 2019;Granstrand and Holgersson 2020;Klimas and Czakon 2022;Ritala and Almpanopoulou 2017;Thomas and Autio 2020;Yaghmaie and Vanhaverbeke 2019).…”

“…Typically for nascent fields, scholars underline the harmful conceptual shortcomings regarding the definition of ecosystems (Granstrand and Holgersson 2020; Klimas and Czakon 2022;Scott et al 2021;Tsujimoto et al 2018), blurry conceptualizations (Aarikka-Stenroos and Ritala 2017; Oh et al 2016), or the deficit of operationalizations (Ritala and Almpanopoulou 2017). Several gaps in the current understanding of ecosystems (Bouncken and Kraus 2021;Thomas and Autio 2020) are widened by rapid changes in the business environment, growing uncertainty (Bouncken and Kraus 2021), and increasing openness to both cooperation and coopetition (Zhang and Watson 2020). Additionally, it is also quite common to find different terms for the same type of ecosystems, the same term for different ones, or no distinction between various types of ecosystems despite fundamental differences (de Gomes et al 2018;Pattinson et al 2018).…”

“…We empirically ground both the structural (Granstrand and Holgersson 2020) and the dynamic (Bouncken and Kraus 2021) views on IEs, and develop a framework for mapping the actors, their roles and their degree of engagement in co-innovation processes. Our in-depth study focuses on the Gaming Innovation Ecosystem in Poland, a globally successful example of a knowledge-intensive and highly creative innovation ecosystem.…”

Hatching start-ups for sustainable growth: a bibliometric review on business incubators

“…With the help of questionnaires and in-depth interviews, various patterns of the relationships between the participants within the individual firms and their specific roles and responsibilities can be revealed. Additionally, there is no research on the role of business incubators in entrepreneurial ecosystems that consist of multiple actors, which is essential for achieving and sustaining growth (Bouncken and Kraus 2021).…”

Facilitating innovation in FinTech: a review and research agenda

“…It may also be hypothesised that the need for collaboration among ecosystem actorsbanks, start-ups, regulators, investors, support organisations and so on-is particularly high in the financial sector to access shared resources and knowledge. As such, the application of entrepreneurial ecosystems research can provide fruitful contributions to theory and practice by exploring how ecosystem actor interactions influence FinTech innovation activities (Bouncken and Kraus 2021;Alaassar et al 2021b). Competition among business-to-consumer FinTech start-ups and banks is another promising topic that has not gained significant attention (Berman et al 2021).…”