Entrepreneurship Micro-Ecosystems in Practice

Introduction

Well-functioning and growing entrepreneurial ecosystem is beyond any doubt an important issue for local governments, both public and private institutions that focus to foster entrepreneurship, as well as for the entrepreneurs themselves. The creation of functional entrepreneurship ecosystems is believed to foster innovation and growth of new enterprises, and to create agile collaboration between institutions and entrepreneurs. On the other hand, there are many issues with a rapid employment of entrepreneurial ecosystems without a solid base of knowledge on the topic. Entrepreneurial ecosystems represent the social, cultural, political and economic context surrounding, supporting and influencing entrepreneurs (Neck et al., 2004). There is a growing body of knowledge that takes on the challenge of the definition and theorization of the entrepreneurial ecosystems. The creation and implementation, as well as definition of the processes that take place within the entrepreneurial ecosystems, and what separates well-functioning and poorly functioning ecosystems are topics that need to be understood in order to help building and maintaining an entrepreneurial ecosystem at any level.

Universities play an important role as an actor within the entrepreneurial ecosystems on both national and regional level, since they provide knowledge and education, trained labour force (Spiegel & Harrison, 2018), and in many cases also potential entrepreneurs. The interaction and impact of universities in influencing and shaping the context of entrepreneurs both outside and inside the campuses, represents an interesting branch of research, that is growing in importance.

Understanding the role of universities in the entrepreneurial realm in the last decades led institutions all over the world to shift their attention to entrepreneurship with the intention to improve students´ chances for a bright future. The number of entrepreneurship education programs have increased exponentially (Katz, 2003; Kuratko, 2005; Solomon, 2007), and the discussion surrounding their impact on both entrepreneurship development and the entrepreneurial ecosystem is of great interest (Duval-Couetil, 2013; Rideout & Gray, 2013; Martin et al., 2013; Bae et al., 2014).

Most researches that address the issue of the impact of entrepreneurship education focus on a few particular programs (Fayolle et al., 2006; Souitaris et al., 2007; Lanero et al., 2011). We argue that university campuses, especially in universities with a strong focus on entrepreneurship, have turned into entrepreneurial ecosystems on a small scale, and need to be understood better. We believe that these university ecosystems play an important role for the companies that are started by the local entrepreneurs (be it students, alumni or employees of these institutions), and foster the local and regional entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems at university campuses are an organic answer for entrepreneurs’ needs and contributions and are composed of many elements depending of the environment they are created in, origin of its economy, business culture and history. Overall, the ecosystems are shaped by the complexity of the university’s environment and context. Internal and external forces mold the structure, organization, topics and define stakeholders, depending on the region where the campus or university is located, generating different formats of these “micro-ecosystems”. It is a task of the micro-ecosystem managers at the university, to identify the internal and external forces that have a direct impact on the development of entrepreneurs and take advantage of the unique mixture of elements that the environment provides.