Mapping entrepreneurship support organisations: An examination of the ‘cluttered landscape’ critique

Abstract

Entrepreneurship support organisations (ESOs) support entrepreneurs with the provision of knowledge, resources, and training. They are a popular economic development tool for promoting entrepreneurial activity. However, the large number of ESOs has led to criticisms of oversaturation. We investigate this claim by analysing the ESOs in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Glasgow, Scotland. We draw on publicly available documentary data to map the ESOs landscape and adopt the organisational thickness lens to analyse and interpret our findings from a holistic perspective. Although the literature largely presents ESOs as homogenous, we find a large number of heterogeneous ESOs that provide a wide range of support activities which can cater to different needs. However, they do not clearly target a specific segment of entrepreneurs which makes it difficult for the clients to differentiate between them and find the most suitable ESO. This is likely the explanation for the perception of a ‘cluttered landscape’ with too many players. Considering that entrepreneurs draw on different support providers over the course of their entrepreneurial journey, a key implication of our study is that the issue of clutter is likely to improve with greater segmentation rather than reducing the number of ESOs.

Ecosystem pipelines: Collective action in entrepreneurial ecosystems

“…The pipelines in the Scottish ecosystem are highly concentrated among (predominantly publicly funded) entrepreneurship support organisations. This partially reflects the fact that, historically, the public sector in Scotland has maintained a dominant role in the funding and provision of entrepreneurship support due to a perception of market failure (Hruskova et al, 2023; Spigel, 2016), which is not uncommon in entrepreneurial ecosystems (Mazzucato and Penna, 2014, p. 5; Bramwell et al, 2019, p. 276). In fact, one informant stated that ‘ we don’t have a military industrial complex in Scotland, we have an entrepreneurial support industrial complex ’ (SCD-1), meaning that entrepreneurship support has become a self-serving industry of its own.…”

“…Therefore, it is entrepreneurs who are the beneficiaries of collective action, not the pipeline partners. This is likely due to the shared public source of funding for most pipeline partners, which does not require them to charge for their services to survive (Hruskova et al, 2023; Spigel, 2016) but instead allows them to focus on delivering rather than selling their services. This is not to say that the pipeline partners do not benefit in any way, but rather that they and their public funders are motivated by the long-term prospect of increased economic growth and the resulting tax revenues (ESO-7; ECD-1; ECD-2; ECD-4).…”

“…The critical realist case study helps us understand the dynamics of a phenomenon within a specific setting (Easton, 2010) and, in doing so, identify, explore, and explain the causal powers, processes and mechanisms at work (Ackroyd and Karlsson, 2014). For the purposes of this study, the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Scotland was selected as a ‘critical case’ because it exhibits both ecosystem (Hruskova et al, 2023; Logan, 2020; TechCrunch, 2021) and governance dynamics (Autio and Levie, 2017; Rocha et al, 2021; Spigel, 2016) and is therefore, representative of the phenomenon under study.…”

“…Compared to the rest of the country, Scottish high-growth firms seem to contribute less to creating employment and economic development more broadly (Mason et al, 2015) and they generally struggle to maintain high growth for long periods of time which suggests that their growth is episodic and discontinuous (Hart et al, 2020). Therefore, there are various support interventions in place, typically funded by the public sector, to help entrepreneurs start and grow their ventures (Hruskova et al, 2023; Spigel, 2016). This includes Scotland’s participation in the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Programme (2014) between 2012 and 2014 to further develop its entrepreneurial ecosystem and the Scottish Government’s (2013) Scotland Can Do agenda to promote entrepreneurship in order to make Scotland ‘a world-leading entrepreneurial and innovative nation’.…”

“…Thus, the ‘bottom-up and top-down’ approach (Colombo et al, 2019, p. 423) recognises that ecosystem governance is a collective endeavour by actors whose activities or interventions shape their environment (Han et al, 2021, pp. 547–548), provide assistance to entrepreneurs (Hruskova et al, 2023; Spigel, 2016), and help optimise resource exchange (Hernandez-Chea et al, 2021) in an iterative manner that enables more effective support mechanisms for entrepreneurs (Abootorabi et al, 2021; Knox and Arshed, 2021). In other words, ecosystems are governed through collective action based on horizontal relationships as opposed to hierarchical command-and-control (Ostrom, 2010b).…”