How should an entrepreneurship ecosystem be? Entrepreneurship ecosystems as an artifact of design

Abstract

entrepreneurship ecosystems are the new trending topic in entrepreneurship research: We are trying to characterize them, measure them and even replicate them. However not many things are certain about them. Are these ecosystems just a collection of parts? If every entrepreneurship domain is present in a region, do we have an ecosystem? Until now entrepreneurship ecosystems, have been widely studied from a managerial and economic standpoint. There are some methods for measuring growth, startup creation and other economic results, but entrepreneurship ecosystems are more than numbers; cultural, social and human aspects in general have been underestimated. With this proposition of entrepreneurship ecosystems as design artifacts what the researchers are trying to portray is that fostering entrepreneurship ecosystems requires a human intervention, and a design approach may help to understand why some ecosystems flourish and some other perish. The main invitation of this paper is to leave preconceptions and usual managerial approaches to embrace the view from systemic design and understand entrepreneurship ecosystems as a complex system that is designed to promote the interactions of agents, the fascinating part of it, is that all of those new interactions, change the ecosystem and redesign it every time. Presenting the entrepreneurship ecosystems with a view from design can help us fill the gap between theory and practice when we try to foster an entrepreneurial ecosystem in a region. Adding the design approach could help policy makers and stakeholders of entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world to formulate better methods and practices to describe, model, propose and reconfigure the ecosystem. © 2018 Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All rights reserved.