Unpacking Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Health

Abstract

Extant entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) literatures have identified the building blocks and key components of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. However, relatively less is known about what constitutes the health of an EE and based on what dimensions we could evaluate the health of an EE. Following an inductive approach, we have conducted qualitative case studies on three representative entrepreneurial ecosystems: Cambridge UK, Silicon Valley US and Shenzhen China. Our finding shows that entrepreneurial ecosystem health is consisted of three dimensions and each dimension contains two themes: ecosystem services (regional resources and regional entrepreneurship), ecosystem functions (enabling conditions and entrepreneurial process) and ecosystem resilience (robustness and adaptation). With these dimensions and themes, we also propose a dynamic view of EE health. We seek to contribute to entrepreneurial ecosystem literatures with the EE health model and to the regional entrepreneurship literatures through elaborating the feedback impacts of regional entrepreneurship on regional resources.