Leadership in Startup Communities: How Incubator Leaders Develop a Regional Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Abstract

Scholars are increasingly adopting an ecosystems perspective focused on the complex systems of factors that influence organizations. A type of ecosystem that is receiving significant academic and practitioner attention is the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE): the interconnected system of actors and forces that supports or hinders entrepreneurship in a geographic area. However, the role that leaders play in ecosystem development, particularly in unmunificent contexts, has received little attention. The purpose of this study was to investigate EE leadership and development and induce a theory explaining how it unfolds. An inductive research design was combined with the case study methodology to analyze the leadership of an entrepreneurial support organization (an incubator) and its role in developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem. The findings revealed that incubator leaders constructed a dynamic leadership model that evolved as the EE developed and was tailored to the region’s strengths and weaknesses. The study contributes to research at the nexus of leadership and entrepreneurship by introducing a new level of analysis (the meta-organization), focusing on an underexamined leader-type (the support organization), and emphasizing the interplay between leadership and regional characteristics.