Fostering Productive Entrepreneurship : An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Perspective

Abstract

Entrepreneurial activities and entrepreneurs do not emerge in isolation rather in a very integrated and complex system (ecosystem) with multiple actors (Cowell et al., 2018). The magnitude of entrepreneurship’s contribution to socio-economic development is contingent upon the respective country’s entrepreneurial enabling environments (ecosystems)-EEs (Colombo & Dagnino, 2017). As the newly emerged research stream, entrepreneurial ecosystem has increasingly captured the attention of scholars, policy makers and practitioners (Malecki, 2018). Moreover, the term entrepreneurial ecosystem has been used to express and explicate the frameworks on how entrepreneurs and start-ups interact with other actors. The success of entrepreneurs is fueled by conducive entrepreneurial supporting environments characterized by multiple interconnected players who offer valued resources to them (Audretsch et al., 2019). Thus, the phenomenon of entrepreneurial ecosystems has been recently used as the framework to describe and explain the integrated nature of economic, political, social, and cultural aspects that boost the growth of innovative new enterprises and supports high risk endeavors (Philip, 2017).