Bringing together cutting-edge insights and critical perspectives, this Research Handbook advances the understanding of the development, dynamics, and different facets of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This volume presents theoretical and empirical research on universities and their entrepreneurial ecosystems to better grasp the connections between universities and their surrounding environments and their engagement with sustainability. The book provides a better understanding of the entrepreneurial characteristics of universities. It examines the ways in which universities’ collaboration and participation in an ecosystem support business and industry transformation. It also investigates how universities function within the university/industry/government/third sector relationship nexus. The book enables the systematisation of the literature while simultaneously builds theory, empirically testing existing theories, and contributes towards a future research agenda geared towards sustainability. The book gathers contributions from varied geographical contexts providing an international perspective.

The concept of 'entrepreneurial ecosystems' has emerged as a means for theorizing and making policy-decisions concerning entrepreneurship and economic development within and across cities and regions. Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Cities and Regions assembles original contributions from scholars across the world to provide an in-depth analysis of a concept that has the capability to capture a dynamic global economy with entrepreneurial innovation at the crux of its future development. It addresses wider issues concerning the evolution of new forms of industrial organisation. The book develops an agenda and understanding that aims to build upon the early explosion of interest within academic, policy, and practice circles by providing new and important insights that contribute to knowledge, direct future investigations, and to increase the effectiveness of research-based policy and practice. Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Cities and Regions builds a framework for establishing a robust and sustainable concept that can help propel an understanding of how cities and regions around the world can use entrepreneurship and innovation as a catalyst for their future economic, social, and environmental development. The volume highlights the need to account for urban and regional contextual factors when determining the strength or otherwise of entrepreneurial ecosystems, and illustrates that these factors can lead to the development of entrepreneurial activity of quite a different nature across cities and regions.

Strategic Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Business Model Innovation is the first collection to focus both on entrepreneurial ecosystems and business model innovation, thereby taking a novel and new approach to entrepreneurship and strategic management.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have recently received considerable attention from scholars and policymakers. This study sheds light on public accelerators as anchor tenants of entrepreneurial ecosystems and aims at investigating their roles in the early ecosystem evolution. Based on a single case study with the Santiago entrepreneurial ecosystem in Chile, this study reveals five steps in which public accelerators orchestrate resources and develops a framework of the role of public accelerators in the evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

This book aims to provide new approaches to analysing and thinking about how entrepreneurial ecosystems develop and evolve over time as well as shed light on the relatively unexplored area of entrepreneurship ecosystem dynamics. The concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems has emerged as a framework to understand the nature of places in which entrepreneurial activity flourishes. Time is fundamental to the analysis of the dynamics of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. New firm creation, survival, growth and demise all occur within a temporal context that is, over and within time. Systems approaches to research invariably model the influential effects of the actors and elements that shape, re-shape, maintain, shift and change the system itself. An entrepreneurial ecosystem point of view, therefore, is inherently time-dependent and provides an analytical framework that reveals how the number and diversity of entrepreneurial actors situated in a place and time influence the creation of new firms, their survival, growth, and ultimately the stability of markets and industry in a time and place. Whether for better or worse, the historic and present time dimensions underpin the functioning and trajectory of entrepreneurial ecosystem performances and how they are shaped over time. Each chapter in this edited volume outlines a particular perspective and/or a unique case drawn from a range of countries that collectively reveal the dynamics of an ever-changing entrepreneurial ecosystem. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and the Diffusion of Startups addresses, for the first time, the emerging notion of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Chapters from leading scholars in the fields of entrepreneurship and strategy explore new ideas and provoke debate in both academia and practice. Covering the emergence, dynamics and management of entrepreneurial ecosystems and offering conceptual tools, experimental evidence and practical examples, this book will be invaluable to those seeking a greater understanding of entrepreneurship and startup strategies, both practitioners and students.

This thesis examines stakeholder relationships in entrepreneurial ecosystems by focusing on the importance of sustainability, education and culture in this context. A three-staged research approach on the topic is employed. First, based on a systematic literature review the relevance of stakeholder theory for the creation of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems that encourage sustainable entrepreneurship is examined as conceptual approach. Second, a qualitative empirical stance is used to investigate stakeholder involvement from the entrepreneurial ecosystem at 20 higher educational institutions in 19 European countries with regard to entrepreneurship education. Third, comparative, quantitative empirical research is conducted to identify cross-cultural and stakeholder-related factors that determine the perceived strength of the sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems in Austria and Germany. The findings of this thesis indicate that stakeholder theory, sustainability, education and culture all matter for developing strong entrepreneurial ecosystems. These results can be of interest for policy makers, entrepreneurship educaters, entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurial stakeholders, who aim at strengthening regional entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Why do tech start-ups emerge rapidly in emerging economies like India? What kind of entrepreneurial ecosystems have evolved for tech start-up promotion? What is their structure? What role do they play in the nurturing of tech start-ups to the advantage of regional economies? This book examines the trend of evolving entrepreneurial ecosystems for tech start-ups in India, ascertains its structure and examines its role in the nurturing of tech start-ups over its lifecycle, to bring out its implications for Indian economy. At the outset, it traces and conceptualizes what it terms an "ideal ecosystem" for tech start-ups in the Indian context, and explores the historical evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems in two of the six leading start-up hubs in the country, namely, Bangalore and Hyderabad. It describes the characteristics and the structure of these ecosystems as they prevailed in the two start-up hubs, and analyses the role that they play in nurturing the development of tech start-ups. Finally, this book explores the ecosystem gaps that exist in the two cities, the factors causing these gaps, and makes policy recommendations to encourage the growth of a "healthy and vibrant" entrepreneurial ecosystem for the accelerated growth of tech start-ups in these two cities in particular, to promote employment, innovation and economic growth in the country at large. Policy makers, researchers, engineering and management students, technology and business mentors, angels, venture capitalists, and MNC executives will find the book informative, revealing and a source of valuable insights into a new, rapidly emerging entrepreneurial India.

Africa suffers from two main diseases: poor management and a lack of vibrant entrepreneurial activity. The continent has the raw materials, the people, and the potential to be developed, and yet there remain barriers that prevent it from bettering itself. To promote entrepreneurship as an engine of economic development and growth, the author has developed a Quintuple Helix Model which advocates mutual cooperation and information sharing among the five helices and provides valuable guidelines to policymakers on how to build entrepreneurship ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa. It goes on to examine the roles that government, donors, and public and private sectors play and how Africans themselves might take the development of entrepreneurial societies into their own hands. The book includes seven chapters that emphasize the key role that each of the five components could play in the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Entrepreneurship scholars, policy makers, and national and local governments of sub-Saharan Africa will value this insight as they strive to create a more favorable landscape for their citizenry.