Abstract
Regional business development is driven by family firms, which are generally deeply embedded in their region, particularly in rural areas. This study explores how family entrepreneurs’ embeddedness drives an entrepreneurial ecosystem as a regional context for innovation. For this purpose, the study brings together entrepreneurship research on embeddedness and on ecosystems, and develops the entrepreneurial ecosystem embeddedness framework to better understand the connection of entrepreneurs to their local environment along three dimensions. Analyzing qualitative interviews from the hospitality context with a pattern matching approach, we highlight the role of family entrepreneurs’ (1) horizontal embeddedness in the economic and socio-political environment, their (2) vertical embeddedness in industry regimes, in particular the family, and their (3) spatial embeddedness in the region for value creation. Thereby we contribute to a differentiated understanding of how embeddedness as a social fabric relates to entrepreneurial ecosystems. The propositions of this study recommend raising awareness for managing entrepreneurs’ embeddedness along these three dimensions since unilateral engagement and a lack of coordinated embeddedness can restrict value creation.
Highlights
Entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) research has gained attention in the past years
We indicated the importance of vertical embeddedness (Fig. 2, pattern 2) and three mechanisms could be distinguished: Vertical embeddedness includes family entrepreneurs’ perceptions of entrepreneurship, which are more about managing
This paper explored how family entrepreneurs’ embeddedness as a social fabric drives regional EE development
Summary
Entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) research has gained attention in the past years. This perspective complements entrepreneurship research by offering a systemic lens to “incorporate cultural, economic, social, and political considerations in an evolutionary view of how entities interact in society” While early research (Feld 2012; Isenberg 2010) was inspired by high-tech and start-up ecosystems in the United States and Israel, more recently scholars considered regional EEs to explain entrepreneurial success in other contexts and regions (Cohen 2006; de Villiers Scheepers et al 2018; Eichelberger et al 2020). Understanding EEs depends on acknowledging their context factors such as the nature of interactions among the key actors (Brown and Mason 2017; Lingens et al 2020)
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