Stimulating the development and professionalization of high-tech entrepreneurs
Abstract
In a fast-changing environment, it is difficult to create, let alone grow, entrepreneurial firms. With this understanding and acknowledging the multi-actor embeddedness within entrepreneurial ecosystems, entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs) and related initiatives have emerged over the past decades to help limit the negative effects originating from liabilities of smallness and newness that obstruct young firms’ development. Given the potential value of growing firms on economic development, high expectations and calls from research for “more and better” support have generated both an impressive research tradition as well as proliferation and diversity within the ES industry itself. Nevertheless, despite the significant contributions to our knowledge of firm growth, services available to support it, and resources required to enable it, there seems to be a lack of understanding of how effective support is developed. Moreover, there seems to be a large emphasis on external aid, neglecting the critical role of the entrepreneurial firms’ own internal development in that process. Hence, much remains to be explored on the roles played by the interrelated actors and their impact on the support process itself. We follow other authors in the field, indicating that current inconsistencies in ES research are partly due to a lack of understanding as to what the phenomenon of ES actually entails and how it is shaped. We argue that there is a need to focus on the interdependent relations of the actors involved and their independent contributions to the ES process. As such, in this research, we aim to contribute to ES literature by improving our understanding of the roles of the entrepreneurial firms and of the ESOs and their collaboration in addressing entrepreneurial growth and its obstacles.
Funding
Interreg2Seas project, called SPEED (Smart Ports Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development), between January 01, 2019 - June 30, 2022.
Researchers
- Prof. dr. Sascha Albers (promotor)
- Prof. dr. Johanna Vanderstraeten (promotor)
- Morane Atzmon