Entrepreneurial ecosystems do not just differ in size and scale!

In our recently published paper “Theorizing typologies of entrepreneurial ecosystems” in Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, we set out to answer this question.

Most existing typologies differentiate entrepreneurial ecosystems by industry, development stage, or resource endowment: for example, by the amount of capital, talent, entrepreneurial activity, or growth they exhibit. But these differences alone do not explain why places such as Sofia or Wroclaw can outperform more resource-rich cities such as Melbourne or Dubai.

In our paper, we propose a different lens. We argue that differences across entrepreneurial ecosystems can be understood along two dimensions: structural thickness, referring to the interdependency and density of connections among ecosystem actors and institutional factors, and locus of focus, referring to the spatial orientation of ecosystem actors. Combining these two dimensions results in four broad ecosystem typologies: embedding, emerging, exploring, and extreme growth. Importantly, none of these types is inherently better than another. Rather, they represent different ecosystem types that can support different forms of productive entrepreneurship.

To illustrate the typology, we apply it to 748 cities across 102 countries. With this framework, we hope to shed new light on a long-standing puzzle in entrepreneurial ecosystem research: why the relationship between ecosystem resources and entrepreneurial outcomes appears so inconsistent across studies. Perhaps we are not looking at a broken clock, but at multiple clocks, each telling a different time.

For policymakers, this suggests moving away from simply importing supposed “best practice” models. Instead, interventions should start by diagnosing what type of ecosystem already exists in a particular place, and what type policymakers and ecosystem actors want to develop.

Working on this research with Ben Spigel, Maksim Belitski, and Andreas Wahl was a great experience. We see the typology as a starting point for future empirical testing and, in particular, for studying whether and how entrepreneurial ecosystems transition between different types over time.