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Exploring the interdependencies of the entrepreneurial ecosystem using feedback-guided analysis for social enterprise resilience
Abstract
Studies on developing social enterprises suggest that resilience can be achieved through supportive stakeholder relationships and networks in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This ecosystem is important for social enterprises as they are confronted with uncertain and complex conditions emerging from their pursuit of both social and commercial objectives which tend to reveal internal weaknesses and tensions. Although prior work on entrepreneurial ecosystem has made significant progress, the processes involved in interdependence need to be explored as they create and reproduce the overall ecosystem. This study attempts a shift of focus from the identification of individual components to a view which identifies entrepreneurial ecosystem as a complex and nonlinear system that changes, adapts, and evolves over time. The feedback-guided analysis using the cultural adaptation template is applied towards developing conceptual models to examine the interdependencies in the ecosystem aimed at relationships between and among cultural, environmental, political and social factors. This is done through documenting the experiences of Philippine social enterprises to understand the feedback structures that shape its entrepreneurial ecosystem. The models may serve as an assessment tool to determine management issues, its root causes and the non-obvious interactions that shape system performance over time.
... This suggests that the healthcare system in Tokyo was more resilient to this form of disruption despite the population density in the urban setting. Reasons for such differences are beyond the scope of our model, but may be explored using feedback-guided analysis, as shown by Tiongco and colleagues in their modeling of interdependence and the influence of stakeholder relationships and networks on resilience [22]. ...
Managing inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a major challenge for physicians and patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand the impact of the pandemic on patient behaviors and disruptions in medical care, we used a combination of population-based modeling, system dynamics simulation, and linear optimization. Synthetic IBD populations in Tokyo and Hokkaido were created by localizing an existing US-based synthetic IBD population using data from the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare in Japan. A clinical pathway of IBD-specific disease progression was constructed and calibrated using longitudinal claims data from JMDC Inc for patients with IBD before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Key points considered for disruptions in patient behavior (demand) and medical care (supply) were diagnosis of new patients, clinic visits for new patients seeking care and diagnosed patients receiving continuous care, number of procedures, and the interval between procedures or biologic prescriptions. COVID-19 had a large initial impact and subsequent smaller impacts on demand and supply despite higher infection rates. Our population model (Behavior Predictor) and patient treatment simulation model (Demand Simulator) represent the dynamics of clinical care demand among patients with IBD in Japan, both in recapitulating historical demand curves and simulating future demand during disruption scenarios, such as pandemic, earthquake, and economic crisis.
Social entrepreneurship is a relatively recent field in research. However, it has become appealing for researchers in the last years. Nevertheless, the research related to entrepreneurial ecosystems for social entrepreneurship is limited and restricted to developed economies such as the United States and the United Kingdom. This paper focuses on study the social entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bogotá, Colombia, an emerging economy. Through a case study, the research explores the complexities in the history and economic context of the city. And later, it aims to understand the environmental factors and the actors that interact in the ecosystem.
The case study is built after a deep analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews and 21 documents; with an additional review of more than 100 websites. The analysed data presents a social entrepreneurial ecosystem with diverse actors and some efforts to create a public policy around it, with the potential of being sustainable. The researcher concludes with an evaluation of the ecosystem, where, even when the ecosystem has all the elements and actors to sustainable and strong, it is not yet. The lack of efficient networks and support from the Government are weakening the social entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bogotá.
Entrepreneurial ecosystems are receiving heightened attention from scholars and practitioners. Studies have focused on isolating entrepreneurial ecosystems’ components; however, prior research has not offered a theory of entrepreneurial ecosystems that embraces their complexity. To address this omission in ecosystems research, we contend that entrepreneurial ecosystems can be more fully understood if examined through the lens of complexity science and conceptualized as complex adaptive systems. We contribute to entrepreneurship research by developing a complexity-based definition of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Building on this definition, we connect the research on entrepreneur- and venture-level complexity to work on entrepreneurial ecosystems and propose three related forces that will influence entrepreneurial ecosystem emergence: intentionality of entrepreneurs, coherence of entrepreneurial activities, and injections of resources. Beyond developing theory, we describe how scholars can examine entrepreneurial ecosystems as complex systems using qualitative comparative analysis, agent-based modeling, and interpretivist methods. Our theorizing also has implications for entrepreneurs and policymakers.
Research Summary
This research uses insights from field theory to explore the early moments of how entrepreneurial ecosystems form through everyday interactions. We examine the cultural-cognitive and material micro-dynamics of activities occurring in support of social impact entrepreneurs and businesses from 2000 to 2014 in the Seattle WA region using archival and interview data sources. The pattern of results about what actors do and how interactions change over time supports a two-period model of ecosystem formation where initial distributed and disparate activity undergoes a phase transition to coalesce into a more coordinated and integrated social order. The findings point to endogenous sources of structuring, including language and interaction, rather than exogenous sources such as government action or instrumental policy goals.
Managerial Summary
How do the ecosystems that support entrepreneurs form? Rather than being created through top-down actions of governments and other powerful actors, we argue that entrepreneurial ecosystems form through the everyday interactions of individuals striving to create shared meaning, resources and infrastructure needed to support their new ventures. This is especially true in ecosystems focused on creating social impact, which don’t always offer the high returns expected in a market-based capitalistic system. Our study shows how the initial activities of distributed, disparate individuals and groups rather suddenly coalesce into more coordinated, integrated and durable patterns of social interaction, creating the methods, resources and legitimacy needed for an entrepreneurial ecosystem for social impact businesses to coexist with or change existing conventions of market-based capitalism.
Marketing not only creates economic value for a social enterprise, it also must create social value. This paper adopts a case research to five Thailand's food social entrepreneurs to examine how a marketing strategy creates social value. The findings revealed that the majority of them addressed a social problem in a marketing strategy to benefit producers and society. Key contributions include proposing and validating a holistic set of propositions of social enterprise marketing with social value generation. Recommendations for social enterprise marketers and policy-makers are also provided so that they can improve a marketing strategy to address social problems.
Despite intense scholarly interest in entrepreneurial ecosystems, research has not explicitly emphasized ecosystem-level dynamics or explored sources of variance among ecosystems. We theorize that entrepreneurial ecosystems are heterogeneous in a key, system-level characteristic: resilience. We define entrepreneurial ecosystem resilience and theorize that it is intimately tied to the interaction between micro- and macro-level processes of an ecosystem. We contend that entrepreneurial ecosystems differ in both the diversity of participants, ventures, business models, and support organizations, and their coherence around shared values and activities. The interplay between ecosystem diversity and coherence, in turn, produces resilience. Our theory has implications for scholars, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers.
Purpose
The formation of entrepreneurial ecosystems is recognized as an activity that can produce economic development and community revitalization. Social entrepreneurship is also an activity that is receiving growing attention because of its potential for addressing social and economic problems. However, while scholars have focused on how the participants in entrepreneurial ecosystems, such as investors and support organizations, influence ecosystem functioning, it is not clear what role social entrepreneurs can play in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Nor is it known how the entrepreneurial ecosystems in which social entrepreneurs are located can influence the founding and operation of their ventures.
Design/methodology/approach
In this conceptual paper, theory is proposed to explain the interrelationship between entrepreneurial ecosystems and social entrepreneurship.
Findings
It is theorized that entrepreneurial ecosystems will influence the operations and effectiveness of social entrepreneurs through mechanisms such as the ecosystem’s diversity of resource providers, support infrastructure, entrepreneurial culture, and learning opportunities. In turn, social entrepreneurs can shape the entrepreneurial ecosystems in which they are situated by influencing the heterogeneity of ecosystem participants, garnering attention for the ecosystem, and increasing its attractiveness to stakeholders.
Originality/value
Scholars examining entrepreneurial ecosystems have not studied the role of an increasingly important market actor: the social entrepreneur. At the same time, work on social entrepreneurship has not emphasized the community of social relations and cultural milieu in which social entrepreneurs found their ventures. The theory developed addresses both of these omissions and has important implications for practitioners focused on spurring entrepreneurial ecosystems and social entrepreneurship.
This article explores the dynamic ecosystem of social enterprise in Indonesia, specifically legal framework and policy regarding social enterprise. The study involves multiple case studies of organisations with pivotal roles in establishing social enterprises in various sectors. The result confirms the role of social culture, legal form, and politics in shaping the evolution of social enterprise in Indonesia.
This study explores social enterprises’ strategies for addressing mission drift. Relying on an inductive comparative case study of two Italian social enterprises, we show how stakeholder engagement combined with social accounting can successfully support a social venture to re-balance its positioning between wealth generation and social value creation. Indeed, stakeholder engagement helps the internal actors of a social enterprise to rationalize and embody pro-social values previously abandoned, while social accounting reinforces this embodiment process by showing the reintroduced social commitment of the social enterprise to external audiences. Conversely, strategies focused only on social accounting and without significant engagement of external stakeholders prove to be unsuccessful in counterbalancing mission drift because they fail to activate the necessary process of internal re-introduction and operationalization of pro-social values and objectives.
Regional policies for entrepreneurship are currently going through a transition from increasing the quantity of entrepreneurship to increasing the quality of entrepreneurship. The next step will be the transition from entrepreneurship policy towards policy for an entrepreneurial economy. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach has been heralded as a new framework accommodating these transitions. This approach starts with the entrepreneurial actor, but emphasizes the context of productive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not only the output of the system, entrepreneurs are important players themselves in creating the ecosystem and keeping it healthy. This research briefing reviews the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature and its shortcomings, and provides a novel synthesis. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach speaks directly to practitioners, but its causal depth and evidence base is rather limited. This article provides a novel synthesis including a causal scheme of how the framework and systemic conditions of the ecosystem lead to particular entrepreneurial activities as output of the ecosystem and new value creation as outcome of the ecosystem. In addition it provides a framework for analysing the interactions between the elements within the ecosystem. This offers a much more rigorous and relevant starting point for subsequent studies into entrepreneurial ecosystems and the regional policy implications of these.
Entrepreneurial ecosystems have emerged as a popular concept to explain the persistence of high-growth entrepreneurship within regions. However, as a theoretical concept ecosystems remain underdeveloped, making it difficult to understand their structure and influence on the entrepreneurship process. The article argues that ecosystems are composed of 10 cultural, social, and material attributes that provide benefits and resources to entrepreneurs and that the relationships between these attributes reproduce the ecosystem. This model is illustrated with case studies of Waterloo, Ontario, and Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The cases demonstrate the variety of different configurations that ecosystems can take.
The design of adaptation strategies that promote urban health and well-being in the face of climate change requires an understanding of the feedback interactions that take place between the dynamical state of a city, the health of its people, and the state of the planet. Complexity, contingency and uncertainty combine to impede the growth of such systemic understandings. In this paper we suggest that the collaborative development of conceptual models can help a group to identify potential leverage points for effective adaptation. We describe a three-step procedure that leads from the development of a high-level system template, through the selection of a problem space that contains one or more of the group's adaptive challenges, to a specific conceptual model of a sub-system of importance to the group. This procedure is illustrated by a case study of urban dwellers' maladaptive dependence on private motor vehicles. We conclude that a system dynamics approach, revolving around the collaborative construction of a set of conceptual models, can help communities to improve their adaptive capacity, and so better meet the challenge of maintaining, and even improving, urban health in the face of climate change.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to add a holistic and dynamic approach to the emerging body of knowledge of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs). It aims to synthesise research and related neoteric EE concepts by proposing a conceptual framework for the study of the composition and interactions of such systems.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors provide an emergent enquiry perspective by introducing a systematic literature review to inform the development of a conceptual framework, based upon theoretical underpinnings of institutional and network theory.
Findings
This paper highlights neoteric holistic and dynamic approaches to recent scholarship of EEs, including antecedents, related concepts, shortcomings, features, actors, components and resources, recommendations for application, network and institutional perspectives, pathways for future research, and ultimately, a conceptual framework merging aspects of entrepreneurial activity, value creation, EE elements, relational interactions and institutional inferences.
Research limitations/implications
Primary limitations are associated with holistic and dynamic approaches adopted in this study, highlighting that EE heterogeneity is unlikely conducive to a “one-size-fits-all” scenario; further empirical research on the dynamics of EEs is suggested to circumvent such implications while adding to the emerging and growing body of knowledge and application of EEs.
Practical implications
The findings and conceptual framework provide a theoretical platform to base applications to practice in developing nascent and emerging EEs.
Originality/value
A first of its kind study adds a holistic and dynamic emergent enquiry approach with institutional and network underpinnings to EE frameworks.
Cities are complex adaptive systems whose responses to policy initiatives emerge from feedback interactions between their parts. Urban policy makers must routinely deal with both detail and dynamic complexity, coupled with high levels of diversity, uncertainty and contingency. In such circumstances, it is difficult to generate reliable predictions of health-policy outcomes. In this paper we explore the potential for low-order system dynamics (LOSD) models to make a contribution towards meeting this challenge. By definition, LOSD models have few state variables (≤ 5), illustrate the non-linear effects caused by feedback and accumulation, and focus on endogenous dynamics generated within well-defined boundaries. We suggest that experience with LOSD models can help practitioners to develop an understanding of basic principles of system dynamics, giving them the ability to ‘see with new eyes’. Because efforts to build a set of LOSD models can help a transdisciplinary group to develop a shared, coherent view of the problems that they seek to tackle, such models can also become the foundations of ‘powerful ideas’. Powerful ideas are conceptual metaphors that provide the members of a policy-making group with the a priori shared context required for effective communication, the co-production of knowledge, and the collaborative development of effective public health policies.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive perspective on social enterprise development, leading to enhanced understanding of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) marketplace. Design/methodology/approach – General systems theory is applied to case studies drawn from the Philippines, enabling the authors delineate system actors and their interrelationships, system objectives and strategies, key success factors and outcomes. Findings – The BOP social enterprise development process can be modeled from a systems perspective. The resulting model provides valuable information to marketing managers and others. Research limitations/implications – Model development would be enhanced by its adaptation to a broader range of cases, including those involving large national corporations and MNCs in the Philippines and elsewhere. Practical Implications – Three major implications for marketing managers and others who aspire to serving the BOP marketplace are revealed: BOP consumers and producers are intertwined; there is much to be learned from BOP entrepreneurs who have developed innovative product, pricing, promotion, and distribution strategies for BOP consumers; and cooperation with local businesses, government agencies, NGOs and cooperatives can increase the likelihood of success in the BOP marketplace. Originality/value – While previous authors have suggested that it is important to understand the complex system in which social enterprise development takes place, little work has been done to fully describe such a system. This study develops the most comprehensive model of the social enterprise development process to date.
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