Spatial features of entrepreneurial ecosystems

Abstract

Growing importance has been attached to the concept of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EE) as productive structures that encompass complex sets of interaction driving economic agents’ competitive capabilities. Drawing from biomimetism, the EE approach dedicates attention to unraveling the mechanisms through which socioeconomic environments organize to introduce new knowledge and innovations in markets. Yet, while challenges associated with identifying the spatial scale of natural ecosystems have long been part of discussions in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology, and in economic geography, the geographic reach of EE remains largely uncharted in literature. Importantly, from a biomimetic standpoint, we know that ecosystems’ boundaries must be defined according to their formative processes, rather than reflect predefined political or administrative boundaries. In this study, we try to shed some light on these topics, underscoring the analytical and methodological challenges associated with the spatiality of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Thinking about entrepreneurial ecosystems as fixed analytical units attached to administrative boundaries will likely cause an inadequate analytical understanding of how entrepreneurship-oriented relationships are distributed in space.