Empowering Digital Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship actors could create entrepreneurial ecosystems that enable Tech for Good.
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Entrepreneurial ecosystems are networks of actors and attributes that enable entrepreneurial activity within a given context. Their interdependent actors including individuals, groups, organisations and institutions alongside infrastructure and resources are coordinated in a way that is conducive to productive entrepreneurship, such as the emergence or growth of ventures (Stam and Spigel 2018, Roundy and Fayard 2020).
They are dynamic and complex, involving embedded and overarching systems that can be framed by territorial scale e.g., national, city, campus, as well as other characteristics e.g., sectorial, technology, investment.
Innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems
There is significant overlap between innovation ecosystems and entrepreneurial ecosystems. They both concern dynamic webs of actors (organisations and individuals) and networks which enable or hinder innovative or entrepreneurial endeavors. Many attributes and actors involved are the same for innovation and entrepreneurship to flourish in a given context, such as universities, talent, capital and information flows. However in my view, whilst innovation ecosystems focus on generating novel intellectual property, products or services, entrepreneurial ecosystems provide the building blocks for taking innovations to market and successfully building viable businesses. So while innovation ecosystems lean towards knowledge generation, entrepreneurial ecosystems lean towards capitalisation of knowledge outcomes.
Digital social innovation and entrepreneurship
Digital social entrepreneurship strives for the creation of blended value with financial and social returns through utilizing technology (Faludi 2020). Popularly referred to as tech for good and overlapping with digital social innovation (which is integral to digital social entrepreneurship), digital social innovation and entrepreneurship has been recognised by the European Union as a significant opportunity to implement policy goals across domains including sustainability, digital sovereignty and economic competitiveness.
Various research programmes and pilot projects to support digital social entrepreneurship ecosystem building have been funded within the framework of the Digital Agenda for Europe and the Horizons 2020 Programme (European Commission 2015) in addition to national attention and initiatives, for example in the UK (Tech Nation 2019). Key challenges for building digital social innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems in Europe include access to finance, skills shortages and getting to scale (Stokes et al 2017).
Entrepreneurial ecosystems research has concentrated on identifying common meta-attributes (Stam & van de Ven 2021). However, novel research highlights the importance of individual and collective behaviour on entrepreneurial and economic development in cities (Huggins and Thompson 2021). Entrepreneurial ecosystems are socially constructed by actor relations, shaped by the agency of people and organisations (Malecki 2018). Actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems include startup entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers.
The relationships between entrepreneurial ecosystems actors are not based on formal organizational membership but rather “informal ties, commonalities, and interdependencies, such as possessing common goals (e.g., creating new ventures), engaging in common activities (e.g., seeking investment), holding common values, norms, and logics, and locating in the same geographic area.” (Roundy 2020, p. 11) As part of these informal relations, entrepreneurial ecosystems research is yet to identify concrete influences on micro-level entrepreneurial activities (Roundy and Fayard 2020).
Supporting digital social entrepreneurship to enable Tech for Good
In order to support digital social entrepreneurship we need to better understand how the agency of digital social entrepreneurship actors might be supported to contribute to the growth of digital social entrepreneurial ecosystems, as part of broader entrepreneurial ecosystems in cities and regions.
Based on entrepreneurial ecosystems as complex systems that culminate to provide a differing environments for innovation and entrepreneurship in each given location or context, there is no way to 'master plan' or control the ecosystem or its components. Any single intervention, whether it be policy or otherwise will not demonstrate a direct cause and effect as there are so many variables at play.
A more effective way to understand the health of innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems is to take a qualitative approach at the micro level in order to steer attention to be paid to macro indicators and quantitative metrics. The latter are notoriously misused when deployed as indicators of a start up ecosystem's health, with easily measured metrics such as venture capital deals or unicorn valuations considered indicators of an ecosystems current health rather than weighing these against other indicators that demonstrate the long-term viability of innovation and entrepreneurship in a society. Particularly for different types of actors, alternate goals to maximising financial headline figures, including public interest and quality of life. For example employment ratios of companies with billion dollar valuations might show a decline in labour needed by present day companies. Whilst this makes sense in terms of highly skilled workers and new technologies enabling unprecedented productivity, how might it play out in the ecosystem over the long-term, particularly for the labour force, housing affordability and competition for new ventures.
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