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Although entrepreneurial capacity building is a keenly debated topic in migration and diaspora research, the concept of female entrepreneurial capacity and the framing of highly skilled migrant women has remained underexamined. This chapter, therefore, addresses knowledge gaps related to migrant women entrepreneurs (MWEs) by focusing on the entrepreneurial experiences of highly skilled female migrants from both developed and developing countries. Specifically, we turn the ‘disadvantage’ lens towards migrant women’s inherent entrepreneurial dimension, an issue that deserves greater research attention, linking migrant women and their entrepreneurship to the entrepreneurial host context and business environment. Building on rich qualitative data collected via six semi-structured interviews with MWEs based in Finland, we also make practical suggestions for how MWEs can best engage with their entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as suggestions to policy-makers regarding how to improve gender awareness and migrant inclusivity aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have quickly become one of the most popular topics in entrepreneurship research. Ecosystems are the characteristics and factors of a place that support high-growth entrepreneurship. This provides the ability for the field to provide important policy insights about how to aid the development of high growth, innovative ventures, as well as generate new insights into the relationship between the entrepreneurship phenomenon and the contexts it takes place within. However, work in the field remains undertheorized, with a little understanding of how the entrepreneur benefits from being in a strong ecosystem. This chapter argues that it is helpful to return to Ed Malecki’s work in a previous volume of this series, which explored the importance of networks. His work has contributed to a very broad stream of work on entrepreneurial environment. Using this as a starting point, this chapter distinguishes between “top-down” approaches to study ecosystems, which focus on the actors and factors that make up an ecosystem, and a “bottom-up” approach, which instead examines the ways in which entrepreneurs use their ecosystem to get the resources, knowledge, and support they need. The chapter concludes by suggesting how a research agenda for a bottom-up study of ecosystems can be informed by Malecki’s work.

This chapter explores the concept of an entrepreneurship education ecosystem. The concept of ecosystem comes from the natural sciences, but is increasingly applied to regional development, or clusters, which focus on firm inter-organizational relationships. Building on the idea of the university is a key player in a local entrepreneurship ecosystem, this chapter provides a framework for examining a school’s role in this process. A typology is presented that articulates roles that schools may pursue in developing their own internal entrepreneurship education ecosystem.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems provide a comprehensive way to understand the complexity of sport entrepreneurship. Due to the competitiveness inherent in the sport system taking a biological metaphor to understand the development of entrepreneurship is useful. This is helpful in understanding the way diverse entities in the sport industry interact in terms of pursuing entrepreneurial activity. As there are various entities in sport, it helps to take an ecosystem point of view in terms of how they interact. This chapter focuses on how an entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective of sport entrepreneurship is needed to understand the role of stakeholders in the sport industry. Thereby linking the literature on practice theory with entrepreneurship and more specifically entrepreneurial ecosystems.

The entrepreneurship ecosystem is one of the most important elements determining the conditions for the development of modern enterprises. The structure and tools of the system are the subjects of research and analysis by practitioners and researchers dealing with the issues of entrepreneurship. The main objective of these studies is to search for the optimal use of the potential and opportunities of the enterprise sector in relation to current socio-economic problems.

The purpose of the chapter is to present and discuss the possibilities of the impact of the entrepreneurship ecosystem on the development of enterprises in Poland.

The analysis includes directions, support instruments and an assessment of the effectiveness of activities related to supporting entrepreneurship in Poland. To prepare the chapter, a review and analysis of literature, analysis of programs and documents as well as an analysis of statistical data describing the development of entrepreneurship in Poland were used.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems are an essential factor determining the development of entrepreneurship in Poland. There are visible problems related to the implementation of an effective entrepreneurial ecosystem. The experience and adaptation processes of institutions and organisations related to its functioning make the system and its elements work correctly.

The growing uses of digital technologies have been creating several new business opportunities. Recently, a new concept has emerged in the literature, the “digital entrepreneurship ecosystem” (DEE). However, it has been empirically understudied. Thus, this study aims to analyze the influence of DEE on entrepreneurial activity. The meta-organization theory was used as a perspective of analysis. A quantitative methodology was applied in a sample that includes data from 28 European countries through the generalized method of moments. It was concluded that the DEE pillars, informal and formal institutions, market conditions, physical infrastructure, human capital and talent and networking and support positively influence entrepreneurial activity. It was also found that the variables knowledge, creation and dissemination and finance have a negative impact on entrepreneurial activity. Several theoretical and empirical contributions are also left for the various stakeholders. The present study is original, as no known studies analyze the influence of DEE on entrepreneurial activity in European countries from the perspective of meta-organization theory.

Sport entrepreneurial ecosystems are part of the international business environment and help to determine the competitiveness of a place. While the origins of entrepreneurial ecosystems derive from the economic geography field, increasingly international business theories are being used as a way to engage with the cultural and societal context. This means it is important for scholars to take an interdisciplinary perspective on how to define and conceptualize an ecosystem from an entrepreneurial point of view. This chapter reviews the current body of literature on sport entrepreneurial ecosystems and extends it to a more international business perspective by focusing on knowledge spillovers. This will enable sport managers and practitioners to utilize entrepreneurial ecosystems as a way to foster their internationalization efforts.

This paper offers new conversations on entrepreneurial ecosystems as contested communities through a critique of extant work that relies uncritically on social capital. It offers new directions for theorizing and studying entrepreneurial ecosystems guided by a critical perspective of social capital (i.e., arriving from several intellectual traditions including political economy, intersectionality, critical race theory, and feminisms). In doing so, the paper offers insights around how continued structural and relational inequalities based on gender, race and/or immigrant status within the domain of entrepreneurship can be brought to the forefront of ecosystem frameworks. Doing so produces new approaches to the conceptualization and study of entrepreneurial ecosystems as more than sites of economic activity between and among actors, but rather it allows for consideration of how being differentially embedded in social structures matters for entrepreneurship. Differences in social structures within ecosystems reflect broader societal patterns and analyzing them can yield insights about the configuration of institutions. To understand the complexity of how different institutional configurations may lead to different forms of entrepreneurial ecosystems, it is necessary to have different conceptual starting points on social capital (informal) and exchange relationships (formal) as foundational aspects of entrepreneurial activities. Consequently, the paper provides these new analytic starting points, thus providing better explanatory and empirical power to demonstrate how and why inequalities persist in entrepreneurship.

The time is right for a theory on strategic entrepreneurial ecosystems and business model innovation. Both topics have increased substantially during the past couple of years due to their strategic nature. This means they are uniquely placed to provide practical advice but also theoretical development. This chapter discusses the theory in terms of how it bridges strategic planning, innovation management, and entrepreneurship literature. Thereby propelling the field of entrepreneurial ecosystems further by suggesting it has both a strategic and business model perspective. This chapter argues the reasons for a new theory to be developed in order to maintain the relevance and practicality of the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems are fundamental to the functioning of an effective international business system that thrives on value creation. Despite the popularity of the term “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” its origins can be traced back to much of the research surrounding the effects of internationalization on the business environment. In the past 20 years, there has been many changes in the ability of businesses to market their services to consumers in other countries. This has largely been the result of technological innovation in the form of mobile commerce. At the same time, there has been a rise in the number of tourists traveling overseas. Both of these factors have led to the spread of ideas rapidly between countries thereby encouraging an entrepreneurial ecosystem to develop. Whilst much research has been conducted on the effects of internationalization on the economy, there is a shortage of research linking entrepreneurial ecosystems to internationalization effects. For this reason, this chapter is a timely one and an important milestone in the research on entrepreneurial ecosystems. This chapter will discuss the ways to create a conducive entrepreneurial ecosystem by taking into account culture and societal expectations, which leads to a discussion on managerial and policy implications together with future research suggestions.