The attention given to business ecosystems and the intellectual ferment it has generated in the last decade underscore the value to develop a systematic overview of the literature so as to systematize the state of the art on entrepreneurial ecosystems. In this chapter, the authors develop a content analysis of existing studies on ecosystems to understand the main features and key elements epitomizing an ecosystem and to unravel under what boundary conditions firms can develop their entrepreneurial insights coupled with strategic thinking within the ecosystem. The authors advance a map that offers an overview of the ecosystem literature, underscore the main gaps in ecosystems research and single out the key challenges for future inquiry.

This chapter contributes to the recent line of work examining entrepreneurs who participate in multiple ecosystems simultaneously by investigating the mechanisms and outcomes of AppCampus. The AppCampus initiative was a three-year project seeking to leverage and enhance both the entrepreneurial ecosystem around Aalto University and the Windows Phone innovation ecosystem. The authors briefly review the characteristics of both innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems, followed by an analysis of the Windows Phone ecosystem and the Aalto entrepreneurial ecosystem. They then describe the AppCampus initiative, explaining each of its components and how these linked both the Windows Phone innovation and Aalto University entrepreneurial ecosystems, before discussing the effects that AppCampus had on these ecosystems. The chapter concludes with lessons for both entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem leaders.

In this chapter, the authors develop a framework to understand how organizational design fosters those behaviors that aggregate up firm-level entrepreneurial outcomes in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Their proposition is that organizational design variables profoundly shape the acquisition, development, and organization of the focal firm’s entrepreneurial skill set, and in turn the discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. Overall, they sketch a framework that links organizational design, intra-firm entrepreneurial behaviors, and firm-level entrepreneurship.

Literature on crowdfunding has highlighted the role of social capital developed within the platform (internal social capital) in determining the success of a funding campaign. However, to date, prior studies have neglected to determine whether industry specificity may influence this effect. In this chapter, the authors aim to fill this gap by investigating how social capital influences the funding of products belonging to different industries. Using a dataset of 34,121 project launched on Kickstarter during 2014, they found that the internal social capital effect varies by industry and is stronger in magnitude when the industry is characterized by high demand uncertainty and task complexity. Overall, these findings contribute to a better understanding of the role of social capital in early stage financing.

This chapter uses factor and cluster analysis to deepen our understanding of how micro fashion design firms use ecological resources to examine the impact of their ecosystem on the practices of fashion designers. The authors examine the extent to which creative micro enterprises, such as fashion designers, access external resources to compensate for their putative internal deficiencies. They do this by building on a typology of apparel designers and testing whether its combination of market and peer-based orientations explains the behaviour of their sample. They also examine resource nodes: physical sites where actors in a design ecosystem may encounter one another and the material objects that are there, exchange ideas, give and receive emotional support and arrive at a shared understanding of design memes. They finally investigate their role in the transmission of symbolic knowledge and the negotiation of shared meanings and how different types of designers may use them in different ways.

In this chapter, the authors map the business incubators’ perimeter, highlighting their role as connector and activation centers of entrepreneurial ecosystems, thereby setting the theoretical framework for an assessment model based on success drivers derived from global best practices. This framework can be used to aggregate and harmonize the effectiveness of incubation activities in given perimeters, helping investors to better allocate resources and offering useful insights to governments in addressing national public policies.