Bridging the gap between ‘Fin’ and ‘Tech’: The role of accelerator networks in emerging FinTech entrepreneurial ecosystems

Abstract

As the global startup ecosystem matures its constituent actors are co-evolving in interrelated ways, producing localised entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. The entrepreneurial ecosystem literature has identified the shared attributes of these systems, but understandings of their inner-workings, interconnectedness, and variance across such systems is lacking. This paper explores the emergence of FinTech entrepreneurial ecosystems in London and Singapore, finding that a single accelerator actor has played a significant role in driving their emergence out of the existing, broader, entrepreneurial ecosystems. It argues that while the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature benefits from a conceptualisation of these ecosystems as complex adaptive systems, there must be a consideration of the potential for transformative agency by actors in the evolutionary dynamics of entrepreneurial ecosystems.