Top-Down Entrepreneur Support Process Design: A Framework for Resource-Constrained Ecosystems

Abstract

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) research has examined both bottom-up emerging ecosystems, which occur and evolve spontaneously over time, and top-down ecosystems, intentionally created through organizational sponsorship and strategically planned Entrepreneur Support Processes (ESPs) designed to enable productive entrepreneurship. Despite the crucial role organizational sponsorship plays in entrepreneurial support activities that drive EE emergence, prior research has overlooked the critical design methods used to formulate the strategy and temporal dynamic factors required to establish and operate top-down-originated ESPs in resource-constrained ecosystems. Specifically, in the year leading up to initial ESP launch, which design method could be used to effectively determine ESP activities and timing? Informed by a qualitative pilot study involving 17 stakeholders in five top-down initiated EEs, this chapter approaches ecosystems as ESP-driven operating entities and builds on current EE theory along with a range of design theories. The findings argue that effectuation principles can be used to design ESPs for more financially sustainable top-down ecosystems and propose a new fourth, temporal effectuation means principle that explains support activity introduction timing and sequencing. By doing so, this chapter offers evidence and theoretical elaboration for an extended version of the effectuation concept to build top-down initiated EEs in uncertain resource-constrained contexts. These findings could be particularly relevant to inner-city, migrant-, or refugee-based, remote, transition economies or economically/demographically declining regions with a desire to promote entrepreneurship.