Abstract
Root proposes a framework in which complex system analytics plays a pivotal role for enhancing entrepreneurship scholarship and policy. The author suggests new ways to think about the connections between the decisions and strategies of agents and the structure of the environment in which choices are made. The provocative debate of the chapter emphasizes the importance of evaluating the connections between system variables at their macroscopic scale, in the hope of defining global properties that are independent of the details at the microscopic scale. The author concludes that the analysis of entrepreneurial ecosystems through the lens of complex adaptive systems has the potential to produce a literature that is richer in insights about the informal constraints, such as social norms, beliefs and ideologies, and the cognitive processes and cultural elements that underpin them, leading to a meta-theory that integrates a community’s culture and its historical specificity with its entrepreneurship ecosystem.
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Notes
- 1.
Between 1970 and 2017 215 papers on entrepreneurial ecosystems were reported by Scopus and 116 by the Web of Science (Malecki, 2018).
- 2.
The original focus was the “Schumpeterian” entrepreneur.
- 3.
Conventional neoclassical approaches analyze social phenomena in terms of the actions of atomized actors. Individual incentives are seen to be what guides behavior. In theories that are purely structural, behavior is determined according to social norms. Introducing a time element introduces an intermediate position between methodological individualism and methodological collectivism.
- 4.
Simon Levin comments on the synergies between ecology and the theory of complex adaptive systems (Levin et al., 2009, p. vii).
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Root, H.L. (2023). The Ecology of Innovation: The Evolution of a Research Paradigm. In: Acs, Z.J., Lafuente, E., Szerb, L. (eds) The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. Palgrave Studies in Entrepreneurship and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25931-9_12
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