Reconciling Design and Evolution in Economic Development: Methods to Map Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
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2020
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Abstract
Are entrepreneurial ecosystems designed or evolved? Considered as a social construct, entrepreneurial ecosystem practitioners embrace the notion that qualitative entrepreneurship can be fostered through the right combinations of ecosystem factors. This leads to the expectation that entrepreneurial ecosystems can be built, and the appropriate ecosystem factors can be replicated from one context to another. Yet, rooted in geography, many entrepreneurial ecosystem scholars identify the sources of economic novelty as embedded in a region’s capabilities and conditioned by its history—that an entrepreneurial ecosystem cannot be stripped away of its context. These two views have opened debate to more questions; Are entrepreneurial ecosystem boundaries open or closed? What are the appropriate levels of analysis? What, if any, is the role for policy? In this dissertation, I offer a novel entrepreneurial ecosystems framework that integrates both the designed and evolved views and provides a pathway for practitioners to identify areas for targeted policy making that improve regional entrepreneurial outcomes. I do so by distinguishing between the social construct of an entrepreneurial ecosystem and the regionally evolved structure of an economic ecosystem. I argue that entrepreneurial ecosystems are embedded in economic ecosystems and thus entrepreneurship policies must be considered within their regional context. To operationalize this connection between the entrepreneurial and economic ecosystems, I develop a methodology for mapping a region’s entrepreneurship space that identifies industry clusters with the most entrepreneurial potential. Finally, I also provide an example policy assessment of Ventura County, California’s entrepreneurial ecosystem to demonstrate the applicability of this framework at multiple scales of geography and its usefulness for identifying the unique character of any entrepreneurial ecosystem.