AbstractThis chapter aims to provide researchers and policymakers with a pragmatic understanding of three different approaches to entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) research. In particular, we aim to inform theoretical framework selection for researchers and policymakers who share an interest in the cultivation, enrichment, and evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems. To do so, we illuminate three perspectives of entrepreneurial ecosystems and provide guidance on the theoretical frameworks and methods in their research application. Each of the three frameworks encapsulates a particular ecosystem epistemology (biological ecologies, complex adaptive systems, and community capitals). These frameworks converge regarding their emphasis on diversity among ecosystem elements and their inter-relationships, and situatedness within multilevel contexts. A methodological commonality here is the use of qualitative grassroots approaches to assessing entrepreneurial ecosystems. To illustrate the similarities and differences in frameworks and their associated epistemologies and methods, we discuss how these vary in research application. Selecting a framework has implications for research methods and thus also what types of insights can be gained, such as on how EEs can be designed, shaped, or governed.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are often resource-constrained and motivated by necessity or opportunity. They play an essential role in national economies due to their contributions to employment, human capital development, knowledge spillovers, and social mobility in maintaining diverse entrepreneurial ecosystems. Government support policies (GSP), both financial and nonfinancial, can directly impact SME performance or indirectly by developing an entrepreneurial orientation (EO). Few studies have investigated the important question of how GSP simultaneously may impact both the EO and the performance of an SME. Thus, this paper aims to identify the current understanding of how different forms of GSPs relate to and impact the EO and the performance of SMEs. A systematic literature review was conducted using the PRISMA methodology to synthesize this understanding, resulting in 65 relevant articles from the ABI/INFORM, ScienceDirect, Scopus and Web of Science databases. The relationships between the constructs were analyzed using thematic and semantic analyses, employing computer-assisted data analysis software (NVivo 12 and Leximancer 4.5). This resulted in the categorization of GSPs as direct and indirect support policies, with financial and nonfinancial-subcategories, and depicted their pathways of influence on SMEs’ EO and performance. The study found that GSPs have four different pathways by which they can impact performance. Both direct and indirect policies have moderating effects that can magnify the impact of EO on performance. The review established that the direct effect of GSP on EO varies by sector, SME growth-intention, and type of GSP. Based on the findings, we recommend policymakers develop support policies tailored to SMEs’ specific sector and its intentions to enhance performance.

This study addresses the interrelationships between strategy-making, organizational preparedness for corporate entrepreneurship (OPCE), selling actions, and the performance of the organization's business-to-business (B2B) salespeople. A survey of B2B salespeople suggests that entrepreneurial strategy-making is positively associated with OPCE, an organization's entrepreneurial sales actions (i.e., creative selling and sales innovativeness), and, ultimately, its sales performance. This research contributes to the nexus of entrepreneurship and sales literature by highlighting the relationships between entrepreneurial strategy-making, OPCE, creative and sales action innovativeness, and B2B sales performance.

This study explores the efficacy of Vietnam’s One Commune, One Product (OCOP) program as a community development program. Participation in the OCOP program by rural enterprises resulted in increased stocks of community capital: (1) human capital through participation in training and workshops; (2) social capital through networking at OCOP workshops, training events, and trade fairs directly; and (3) financial capital due to enhanced livelihoods through domestic and exports sales of OCOP branded products. These social and economic outcomes result from the OCOP-enabled opportunities for participants to develop their business and entrepreneurial skills and access resources to build better livelihoods while developing their portfolio of community capital and enhancing their rural social and economic entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Accelerators are broadly seen as platforms that government, non-profit, and for-profit organizations use to fast-track the development of entrepreneurial and SME business capabilities. Typically, this occurs as competitive, time-constrained, cohort-centered, authentic learning experiences supported by mentoring and access to the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, management development programs, and financial resources. Interest in how the ventures in the development programs evolve and contribute to the entrepreneurial ecosystem is increasing (Cantner et al. in Small Business Economics, 57, 407–423, 2021), but how the accelerators evolve has yet to be adequately researched. To better understand how accelerators evolve, we adapt Churchill and Lewis (Harvard Business Review, 61(3), 30–50, 1983) conceptual framework of the stages of small business development. This study investigated the life cycle of Australian accelerators from 2013 to 2020. The accelerators ranged from short-term “pop-up” programs to permanent programs. We found through a series of four selected exemplar case studies that these accelerators exhibited a similar four-stage life cycle to their participants, including (1) gestation, (2) survival, (3) viability, and (4) decline or renewal. We also found that external support was a critical issue that determined viability. Our findings support the development of accelerator management to be more agile, resilient, and entrepreneurial, which can confront those adopting a more standardized franchise model. In addition, we adapt Kohler (Business Horizons, 59(3), 347–357, 2016) work on corporate accelerators into an inclusive framework for all forms of accelerators, including considering their geographic context or Place, the actors involved with the accelerator or its People, the accelerator’s value Proposition to participants, the accelerator’s Processes and most fundamentally, its Purpose that will contribute to the entrepreneurial ecosystem practice and literature. This research provides practical considerations on positioning, suitable business models, and maximized operations.

Purpose This study aims to explore if corporations that publicly disclose more information about their managerial values are also more organizationally authentic in enacting these values. Design/methodology/approach A maturity model of managerial values is used that ordinally ranks a corporation’s level of managerial values enactment using corporate annual reports. The samples of corporations’ corporate reports are qualitatively content analyzed, and the outcomes are statistically tested. Findings The findings indicate that as an organization voluntarily discloses more information about its corporate values, it tends to be more likely to enact their espoused values, and their corporation’s level of organizational authenticity increases. Originality/value This study suggests an approach to benchmark a corporation’s level of organizational authenticity using public information, and by doing so, contributes to both policy and practice by offering a framework to compare organizational authenticity between public corporations by their sector, size or the age of the corporation.

This study explores how entrepreneurial marketing can reduce the liability of poorness by enhancing the performance of smallholder agribusinesses in developing economies. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) analyzed surveys from a judgment sample of 190 Vietnamese SME tea producers. Entrepreneurial marketing processes, including innovation, customer-linking, and reputational advantage, were positively related to cost advantage for the SME tea producers but not with differentiation advantage. This implies that SME agribusinesses in developing economies should focus on their cost-based advantage and leverage their customer-linking capacity to create premium-priced offerings. This could be enabled by participating in capacity-building opportunities such as Vietnam's One Commune One Product branding program. The OCOP program offers the opportunity to shift SME agribusiness from a substance orientation toward a more positive entrepreneurial mindset and develop entrepreneurial capabilities to facilitate a more prosperous future.

This study addresses the interrelationships between a business-to-business (B2B) salesperson's sales performance and their level of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial sales actions. Data was collected through a survey of 252 participants (B2B salespeople working in Australia). Structured equation modeling was used to analyze and test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that entrepreneurial self-efficacy strongly influences sales innovativeness and creative selling, highlighting the importance of senior management encouraging and rewarding new selling methods (a salesperson's entrepreneurial actions). Finally, these sales actions positively and significantly impacted individual sales performance. Thus, creative selling and sales innovativeness are powerful influencers of personal sales performance. This research contributes to the sales performance literature by highlighting the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), creative selling, and sales innovativeness. These findings provide additional lessons for senior management when pursuing increased growth and sales performance. As ESE has a positive impact on a salesperson's actions and performance, senior management may wish to encourage an internal environment in which ESE behaviors are not only accepted but encouraged.

This paper demonstrates how the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) can be synthesized to create a comprehensive framework for understanding EEs as comprising dynamic and diverse actors, factors, and interdependencies. We adapt four elements common to CAS and propose a context-specific framework for explaining EEs through people, place, purpose, and process to provide insights for policy, development, and regulatory interventions. Motivated by the challenge to develop a practical and parsimonious framework for comprehensive EE analysis, we present a case study using a CAS approach to illustrate the nature of EEs as dynamic, interconnected social systems and identify opportunities for economic development interventions. The study offers a novel framework for system-level EE analysis, and in doing so, it contributes to entrepreneurial economic development, research, policy, and practice.

New global and domestic policy and regulatory initiatives promoting a circular economy have renewed interest in the beneficial repurposing of commercial waste streams. Likewise, consumer trends and customers’ increased understanding of what they purchase, where it comes from, and what happens to it post-consumption have forced firms to consider reducing and reusing their production waste streams. The forest products industry is an exemplar of becoming more adept at reorganising and exploiting repurposed waste streams for beneficial reuse. This paper explores three case studies from the Australian forestry sector that illustrate how wood waste is being profitably repurposed as an input into other products. We use the lens of the entrepreneurial method to explore how firms recognise, strategically access, and exploit the sustainable opportunities that can range from sustainably sourced inputs to environmental-, social-, and governance-driven consumption and investments. Effectual logic allows the reconceptualisation of forestry waste streams into inputs for use in creating new commercial products and provides a theoretical framework. While the repurposing of wood waste is profitable for the forestry firm, we found that social and economic gains reach far beyond the region in which these activities occur. Innovations often stimulate other innovations, resulting in a virtuous cycle within regional Australia’s emerging circular economy.

This study extends the understanding of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), vertical knowledge acquisition, and actor collaboration to a "whole of value-chain" perspective in transitional economies by investigating a subsistence smallholder agricultural value-chain. It examines the relationships between EO and vertical knowledge acquisition and the role of value-chain collaboration. It also contributes to the understanding of entrepreneurship as an economic development tool by considering how EO moderates the effect of value-chain actor collaboration on acquiring market and consumer knowledge by subsistence upstream actors within value-chains. Data were collected through a survey of smallholder value-chain shifting from selling to local wet markets to selling to cattle collectors and traders and through a value-chain to retailers. The findings suggest that higher levels of EO by smallholders and SME agribusinesses enhance the acquisition of vertical knowledge such as market and consumer preference information throughout the value-chain, and interfirm collaboration positively moderates this relationship.

Chapter 27 describes findings from a longitudinal study of accelerators and the perceptions of accelerator managers conducted from 2013 to 2019 in the evolving Australian entrepreneurial ecosystem. To address a significant gap in the accelerators literature, the authors apply Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to help understand the descriptions and perceptions of the value of mentors by accelerator managers. The findings suggest that mentors do not necessarily add tangible rewards to their protégés. Instead, they find that the impact of mentors in accelerators may be less instrumental or tangible, and might be more educational, reflective, and intangible than previously observed in the literature. The chapter explores the practical and research implications of these findings.

This study furthers investigation into exactly how Social CRM (S-CRM) is different from traditional CRM, and models the interrelationships between its capabilities. It is underpinned in dynamic capabilities theory, to explain how social media, as a resource all organizations use, can lead to differing performance outcomes. It is underpinned in seminal research into traditional CRM, but which does not cater for the disruptive nature of social media. We outline how S-CRM is a second-order dynamic capability consistng of a set of first-order integrative dynamic capabiliies that, when properly interrelated, lead to performance outcomes. We particularly model the role of S-CRM front- and back-office technology capabilities, customer engagement initiatives, and social information processes in driving customer relationship performance. Findings show that S-CRM is different from traditional CRM in a range of ways in the front- and back-offices, and provide a framework for researcher and managers in information systems and marketing to operate at strategic and tactical levels within S-CRM, while being congisant of both.

The activities of innovation system actors, particularly the importance of networks, entrepreneurs, and the role of intermediaries have not yet been integrated into a framework that explains innovation system performance at the project level. This study contributes by exploring the role of the innovation system's actors with respect to its performance. Innovation system performance is studied using multiple cases of projects using statistical inference, network analysis, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The number of actors effectively involved in projects is positively associated with innovation system performance. The network of relationships in the case study innovation system was relatively open, such that the contribution of some actors only became available to the system through the conduit of other actors. Both researchers and intermediaries are highly involved and effective, and the intermediaries' effectiveness contributes to innovation system performance. However, the perceived involvement or effectiveness of these and other actors did not, alone, ensure that the conditions required for innovation system performance were met. The research method and results apply to any innovation project, particularly those in highly regulated, technological fields. The present study's findings demonstrate the application of innovation system theory at the project level. The study has important implications for integrating entrepreneurial marketing into innovation system policy and practice.

PurposeThis study aims to take a whole-of-chain perspective to explore how entrepreneurial orientation (EO) influences collaborative performance in agri-food value-chains through enhancing the acquisition of knowledge.Design/methodology/approachData were collected through a survey of 233 actors, including farmers, intermediaries and retailers in one beef cattle value-chain in the Central Highlands, Vietnam. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypotheses.FindingsThe actors’ level of EO within a value-chain is positively associated with collaborative performance within the beef value-chain. Additionally, knowledge acquisition partially mediates the relationship between EO and collaborative performance.Research limitations/implicationsGeneralizability is limited because of sampling constraints.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of EO from a whole-of-chain perspective in agri-food value-chains in an emerging economy and has implications for policymakers and agri-food marketers.

Leveraging social media influencers allows companies to provide information on their products in a more social and interactive way. Yet, scholarly research on the implications of the effect of influencers on consumer trust, their interest and the purchase decision process is still in its infancy. This study proposes a theoretical model to explain how perceived brand control over an influencer's post and the perceived commercial orientation of such a post affects consumer trust in influencers. Results show that trust of the influencer is reduced more by the post's perceived commercial orientation than perceived brand control of the influencer's post. Although perceived brand control also reduces the willingness to search for more information. The results also show that trust of the influencer is salient in predicting post credibility, which in turn predicts interest and willingness to search for more information.

This study articulates the importance of an entrepreneurial method approach to leadership, relevant contextual issues, and policy implications for developing entrepreneurial ecosystems in a rural context. The entrepreneurial method is proposed as the foundations of a new leadership style to facilitate the creation and success of rural entrepreneurial ecosystems. The contextual issues that make rural entrepreneurial ecosystems unique include the critical need for entrepreneurial leadership in their creation and development; the role of entrepreneurial social infrastructure in enabling and supporting development; the need to leverage networks and virtual platforms to access markets, knowledge, and funding; the scarcity of and need to develop enterprising individuals; the role of institutions and supportive governance; and the importance of natural capital.