Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Regional Policy: A Sympathetic Critique

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.     

Policy Entrepreneurship and Policy Change

This article reviews the concept of policy entrepreneurship and its use in explaining policy change. Although the activities of policy entrepreneurs have received close attention in several studies, the concept of policy entrepreneurship is yet to be broadly integrated within analyses of policy change. To facilitate more integration of the concept, we here show how policy entrepreneurship can be understood within more encompassing theorizations of policy change: incrementalism, policy streams, institutionalism, punctuated equilibrium, and advocacy coalitions. Recent applications of policy entrepreneurship as a key explanation of policy change are presented as models for future work. Room exists for further conceptual development and empirical testing concerning policy entrepreneurship. Such work could be undertaken in studies of contemporary and historical policy change.     

Institutions,Incentives, and Policy Entrepreneurship

Policy entrepreneurship is often used to explain agenda setting through reference to the behavior of individual “change agents.” But there are still gaps in our understanding of what motivates entrepreneurs. Rational choice theory emphasizes the importance of material and nonmaterial incentives; however, it remains unclear what role institutions play. This article aims to empirically examine the relationship between incentives and institutional encouragement of innovation. Using a case study of the federal government of Canada, I find evidence that incentives matter. Government agencies with many incentives are more likely to encourage innovation than agencies with few incentives. These results underscore the importance of institutions in determining the motivations of policy entrepreneurs, and suggest future research should focus on the interplay among individual, political, and institutional factors.     

Policy entrepreneurs and promotion of Australian state knowledge economies

Policy entrepreneurs seek to shift the status quo in given areas of public policy. In doing so, they work closely with others, and their activities call for high levels of political skill. This article examines the actions of policy entrepreneurs who promoted the development of knowledge economies in two Australian states: Queensland and Victoria. During the past two decades, national and sub-national governments around the world have sought to nurture knowledge economies within their borders. Our analysis of knowledge economy advocacy improves understanding of how specific individuals – as strategic team builders – can promote major policy change. This focus on team work and coalition-building as central elements of the process of policy entrepreneurship offers a corrective to some earlier studies that inappropriately conferred lone hero status to policy entrepreneurs.

政策企业家们试图改变公共政策特定领域内的现状。在这个过程中,他们与他人密切合作,他们的活动呼唤高水平的政治技巧。本文考察了政策企业家在澳大利亚的昆士兰和维多利亚两个州促进知识经济的行动。在过去二十年里,世界各地国家以及次国家政府都想在自己的版图内培育知识经济。我们对知识经济促进情况的分析有助于更好地理解何以某些个人如战略团队的建设者们可以促成重要的战略转变。本文聚焦团队工作以及联盟建设,将其视为政策企业家活动的核心因素。这样一种视角是对以往过分强调个人英雄的一种修正。     

Social Networks and Policy Entrepreneurship: How Relationships Shape Municipal Decision Making about High‐Volume Hydraulic Fracturing

Well‐resourced and well‐connected individuals, or “policy entrepreneurs,” often play an important role in advocating and securing the adoption of policies. There is a striking lack of inquiry into the ways that social networks shape the ability of these actors to achieve their aims, including the ways in which network ties may channel policy conflict. To address these gaps, we analyze data from an original survey and an original database of policies to assess the success of policy entrepreneurs (PEs) active in a highly contentious arena: municipal policymaking concerning high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) in New York. We use text‐mining to collect social network data from local newspaper archives, then use those data to construct municipal HVHF policy networks. Municipal anti‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they operate in less cohesive networks, act as bridges to relative newcomers to the governance network, and have a larger number of network connections. Pro‐HVHF PEs appear more successful when they can forge high‐value connections to key decision makers. Policy entrepreneurs on both sides of the issue are more successful when they have a greater number of sympathetic coalition partners.     

Private Citizens as Policy Entrepreneurs: Evidence from Autism Mandates and Parental Political Mobilization

Growing bodies of research in the social sciences point to politicians, bureaucratic officials, interest groups, and other actors who serve as policy entrepreneurs. In this paper, we argue that private citizens can also serve a primary role as policy entrepreneurs. To analyze this phenomenon, we investigate the behavior of private citizens and their role in changing state policies surrounding insurance mandates for autism coverage. Using a thematic analysis of focus groups and interviews conducted with individuals active in the push for autism policy change, we demonstrate that private citizens meet all of the requirements identified for policy entrepreneurs in the existing literature. We then investigate when, why, and how these private citizens step forward into the policy process as entrepreneurs. We show that entrepreneurship occurs when private citizens have needed resources, a sense of duty to fix a policy status quo they see as unjust, and a stake in policy change. We conclude by discussing the importance of our findings to the study of public policy and their generalizability beyond autism policy.     

A progress review of entrepreneurship and regional development: What are the remaining gaps?

This study reviews the literature related to regional entrepreneurship. It identifies the main topical perspectives, advancements and shortcomings, discusses several research gaps and proposes ways forward. The literature review is based on 170 peer-reviewed articles in the leading journals of entrepreneurship and regional science. The findings reveal that major debates occur within the disciplines of regional economics, sociology and economic geography, but discussions across disciplines are scant. While regional economists tend to overlook the role of contextualized agency, and thus neglect processes that may influence entrepreneurs’ acting in distinctive localities, entrepreneurship scholars tend to overlook the role of the spatial and proximate contextual conditions in the entrepreneurial process. Future research should intensify its efforts on the interrelation between entrepreneurial agency and regional structuring in order to expand current understandings of which types of entrepreneurship prevail in different localities.     

The Role of Personal Factors in the Location Decision of Software Services Start-up Firms

This paper explores the factors which influence the business location decisions of start-ups, focusing in particular on the role of personal factors. Established explanations of industry location emphasize proximity to firms in the same or related industries and proximity to a wider set of business services, though recent research suggests that personal factors may play an important role in explanations of industry location—particularly in technology-enabled sectors. A survey of 97 new firms, founded between 2008 and 2012, in the Irish software services sector, shows that the business location decision is influenced by the personal motivation of entrepreneurs to attain a desired quality of life, and that this outweighs economic factors such as proximity to firms within the same or related industries, proximity to a broader set of supporting business services, infrastructure or the availability of government support schemes. Personal factors are particularly important to firms located outside the Dublin metropolitan area and to home-based businesses. This has important policy implications for national and regional governments seeking to encourage entrepreneurship in technology-enabled service sectors.     

En route to New York: diasporic networks and the reconfiguration of female entrepreneurship in Senegal

This article examines the influence of migration and transnational social networks on female entrepreneurship. It interrogates shifting patterns of market development, juxtaposed to the lure of new economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs located at the periphery, Senegal. I critically analyse how a distinct and classed category of Senegalese women entrepreneurs navigates international spaces and legal restrictions in attempts to launch profitable economic ventures in metropolitan centres such as New York City and negotiate new forms of representation and agency in contentious socio-economic spaces. By interrogating the complex interplay between women entrepreneurs and diasporic communities, I weave an often-missing gender perspective into the analysis of the emergence of female transnational entrepreneurship and diasporic social networks. This article demonstrates that diasporic social networks, transnational markets and spatial interconnections, while contributing to market revitalisation and expansion, are nonetheless fraught with tension. Diasporic social networks embody paradoxical positions. They represent an enabling economic transactional space, while embodying an informal social space that nonetheless remains sites of power struggles deeply embedded in gendered, sociocultural and economic dynamics that transfer from local to transnational contexts.     

Partisanship,policy entrepreneurs and the market for ideas: what we can learn from policy failure

ABSTRACT

The Office of Living Victoria (OLV), was established in 2011 by the then Liberal-National Party Coalition Government. It was created in response to a water crisis and intended to revolutionise water management and delivery, challenging established authorities and practices consolidated under the previous Labor government in Victoria. There was a decidedly partisan motivation for its conception. The drive for new ideas and innovation created opportunities for policy entrepreneurs who won the competition against more conventional research advocacy, and determined the agenda of the new agency, in the process curbing an existing policy network. Yet within a short period, this initiative was mired in scandal, and ended in 2014 having failed to achieve its purposes. This article explores this instance of policy failure, assessing the policy trajectory of the OLV in relation to the concepts of partisanship, policy entrepreneurship, and policy networks.     

The ‘Girl Effect’ and martial arts: social entrepreneurship and sport,gender and development in Uganda

In recent years, three notable trends have emerged in the gender and development landscape: the increasing use of sport as a tool to achieve gender and development objectives (SGD); the expanding involvement of transnational corporations (TNCs) in creating, funding and implementing development programs; and the ‘girling’ of development. The last trend has largely been facilitated by the proliferation of the global ‘Girl Effect’ campaign, or ‘the unique potential of 600 million adolescent girls to end poverty for themselves and the world’ (Girl Effect 2011). This article reports on findings from a global ethnography – involving semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis – that considered how sport-oriented Girl Effect interventions impact the lives of girls they target. Using a Girl Effect-focused partnership among a TNC (based in Western Europe), an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) (based in Western Europe) and a Southern NGO (based in Uganda) as a case study, this article examines how SGD programs for Ugandan girls encourage them to become ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’ (Rose 1999) equipped to survive in the current global neoliberal climate using social entrepreneurial tactics such as training to be martial arts instructors combined with activities such as cultivating nuts. Results show how Girl Effect-oriented SGD programs that focus on social entrepreneurship tend to overlook the broader structural inequalities and gender relations that marginalize girls in the first place. I conclude by suggesting that future studies must further explore the socio-economic, cultural and political implications and consequences that social entrepreneurship and ‘economic forms’ of SGD interventions hold for girls.     

Local culture as a context for entrepreneurial activities

This paper examines how an industrial legacy leads to the formation of a distinct local culture and how the culture’s survival provides a context for the subsequent entrepreneurial activities in new local industries. The discussion about culture as a key driver of entrepreneurship and economic growth is well established in the academic debate. However, we know little about how culture is formed. Through a qualitative case study of two polar Swedish cities, the study highlights four key factors which are instrumental in the formation of local culture: initial conditions, characteristics of key players, network activities and composition of newcomers. We show how the local entrepreneurs responded to the underlying assumptions of the two different cultures.     

跨国场域下的企业家精神、国家与社会网络：中国新移民的个案分析

以在新加坡的中国新移民企业家为个案,简要地讨论企业家和企业家精神的内涵及其在全球化时代的展延;分析了新移民企业家跨国知识与技术优势在新兴企业成长中扮演关键作用;论述了跨国移民企业家产生与发展的不可或缺的外在因素以及由此形成的双赢策略;进而阐述跨国性的理论架构如何有助于解释华人企业家在当代世界和中国社会经济发展中的作用。     

‘Whose name's on the awning?’ Gender,entrepreneurship and the American diner

While, in recent years, women-owned businesses have become increasingly common, entrepreneurship itself remains a deeply gendered institution, and one that is constructed through everyday practice rooted in space and place. The purpose of the present study is to explore the woman-owned diner as a distinct environment in and through which configurations of gender and entrepreneurship are mutually constituted, socially enacted, and spatially defined. Drawing upon a case study of a present-day diner in Worcester, Massachusetts, I trace the life narratives of two working-class women through their emergence as entrepreneurs in the diner industry. I reflect upon the distinctive space of the woman-owned diner as it is produced through the interaction between the gendered body-subjects of women owners, the social meaning of ‘feeding work’, and the spatial character of the diner institution. Through the gendered social practice of diner ownership, these two women have overcome substantial social, economic and geographic obstacles to their independence and worked to bridge the divide between the value of public and private work. Building on existing scholarship in the field, this study demonstrates the potential for women's agency through everyday practice as business owners, to create new spaces and alternative means of practicing both gender and entrepreneurship.     

Framing,agency and multiple streams– a case study of parks policy in the Northern Territory

ABSTRACT

There is increasing interest in the role of agency in policy processes for creating effective change. In this paper I explore the critical role of policy entrepreneurs in both creating and capitalising on windows of opportunity through creative framing of issues. I combine Kingdon’s multiple streams framework of the policy, problem and politics streams with the three types of social movement framing – diagnostic, prognostic and motivational – to analyse a case study of pragmatic and innovative policymaking in Australian Indigenous policy. I find that pragmatic policy entrepreneurs used framing to actively refine available policy solutions, particularly in response to structural barriers, and played an active role in brokering the problem in ways to make it politically acceptable. This confirms the importance of ideational processes, and the critical role of framing, in creating windows of opportunity for significant reform.     

Expected job creation across the cultural industries: a sectoral division and its implications for cultural policy

The cultural industries have come to the forefront as the potential job creators of the future. However, building on the concentric circles model and production system view of the cultural industries, we pose that many young and small organizations in the industries lack the motivation, ability, and opportunity to become job creator. We reason that industry location crucially affects job creation expectations. Evidence from an international sample of early-stage entrepreneurs strongly supports this thesis. We identify a divide between entrepreneurs in the ‘core’ cultural industries vis-à-vis those in the ‘non-core’ cultural industries, where the latter group is indistinguishable from entrepreneurs in non-cultural industries in their job creation expectations. Simultaneously, those in the core cultural industries are distinct from others in their expectations to maintain the same number of jobs, rather than grow. These findings have important implications for cultural policy aimed at promoting employment growth in the cultural industries.     

Policy entrepreneurship in Australia: a conceptual review and application

This article adapts the theoretical construct of ‘policy entrepreneurship’ in political science to an analysis of one important initiative in policy‐making in Australia between 1992 and 1994, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools Strategy (NALSAS). Originally an initiative of the Queensland Government, NALSAS sought to advance the teaching of Asian languages and studies of Asia in Australian schools. The then Director General of the Queensland Office of the Cabinet, Mr Kevin Rudd, was its key protagonist. The article identifies and analyses Rudd's adroit policy entrepreneurship that was needed to overcome significant resistance and deliver the subsequent policy outcomes. It does this by carrying out a two‐level analysis that considers individual and contextual factors and concludes that, even though Rudd displayed many of the individual characteristics of a policy entrepreneur, his actions were heavily mediated by contextual factors. The article also demonstrates how a concept developed elsewhere, in this case North America, can be applied in other contexts, and calls for more scholarship on policy entrepreneurship in contemporary Australia.     

Identity construction and ‘coincidental’ entrepreneurship among gay Filipino guesthouse owners in Amsterdam

This article centralizes gay Filipino entrepreneurs in the guesthouse industry in the city of Amsterdam, drawing on the narratives and trajectories of five of them. The article highlights the common threads of experiences of these immigrant entrepreneurs, as these provide interesting insights into the processes of their identity (re)construction and social embedding in the Netherlands and the role of their entrepreneurial involvement in these processes. In addition, the article describes how they relate to their home country, the wider Filipino community in the Netherlands, and the wider Dutch gay community. It will be shown that these experiences and relations sit uneasily with established positions in debates on home and belonging within transnational migration studies and queer studies, notably the idea that moving to western countries of destination cannot be treated as equivalent to moving to ‘queer cultural homelands.’ In addition, the article shows that immigrant entrepreneurship does not revolve around ethnicity per se in the sense that entrepreneurial practices cannot be understood separately from other identity forming structures such as sexuality and class.     

EXPERIENCE THE DIFFERENCE: THE COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES OF FOOD‐RELATED ENTREPRENEURS IN RURAL DENMARK

As food production becomes increasingly integrated, globalized and competitive, small‐scale food‐related enterprises in many European countries are struggling to market and monetize their products. Although these struggles have been well documented, few studies have considered the ways in which food‐related entrepreneurs in rural contexts are adapting to and overcoming these challenges. In particular, little is known about how they differentiate and add value to their products. This article focuses on the development and implementation of new and hybrid commercial strategies by food‐related entrepreneurs in three rural communities in Denmark. These strategies add experiential elements to the longstanding practice of commodifying myths associated with rural settings and identities. Although harnessing culture and experiences to sell things is nothing new, we demonstrate that some Danish entrepreneurs are responding to market competition by tweaking and extending these concepts. In particular, it is argued that entrepreneurs use different experiences with varying levels of intensity and consumer engagement for different purposes. Whereas passive experiences such as storytelling are used to educate consumers about the specific qualities of products, more active and participatory experiences are sold as add‐ons and standalone products. The findings contribute to our understanding of food‐related entrepreneurship in rural contexts, consumption, value creation and the experience of economy more broadly.     

Ethics and Entrepreneurship

An important criticism of public entrepreneurship has been that Us precepts and practices are not consonant with democratic values. This paper examines the meaning of entrepreneurship as defined in bath the public and private sectors, suggesting that some attributes of entrepreneurs that commonly are deemed undesirable–egotism, selfishness, waywardness, domination, and opportunism–actually are functional for entrepreneurial activity. This is because entrepreneurship plays an essential role in addressing a particular type of policy problems (here called "anarchic")–those where goals are ambiguous or conflicting and where the means to achieve them are unknown or uncertain. Finally, methods are suggested for encouraging ethical entrepreneurship, whether undertaken in an anarchic setting or within an organizational matrix that is communitarian or bureaucratic.