Identification of the relationships among the indicators of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems in agricultural startups

Abstract

A sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem focuses on sustainable development and how entrepreneurs can work to achieve innovative, risky, and profitable entrepreneurial activity while maintaining economic, environmental, social, and cultural factors. In this regard, the present study aims to identify and determine the relationships between the indicators of a sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem for agricultural startups. Sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem dimensions were first extracted based on the summative content analysis. Then, the existing criteria and sub-criteria were weighted using the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. For this purpose, 25 key experts in sustainable entrepreneurship were identified. In the second part, the data were analyzed using MICMAC software. Results indicate that ecological, economic, and institutional dimensions were of greater importance in a sustainable startup ecosystem. The results of applying the cross-impact analysis method reveal that employment, business ownership and scale, income and saving, reforming laws, access to information, the existence of NGOs, and awareness and understanding of risk are among the factors affecting the system sustainability. Finally, 12 key factors are selected after examining the extent to which factors affect each other and the status of sustainable startup ecosystems by direct and indirect methods. It can be concluded from the status of the scattering plane of variables affecting the measurement of sustainable ecosystems that the system is unsustainable.