Abstract:

Entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) research has largely focused on macro-level structures, leaving a limited understanding of how ecosystem elements are enacted through everyday entrepreneurial practice, particularly in emerging economies shaped by challenging institutional environments. This developmental paper addresses this gap by examining the microfoundations of finance, human capital, and governance in African entrepreneurial ecosystems. Drawing on 40 qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs situated at innovation hubs in Nairobi, Accra, and Windhoek. Preliminary findings suggest that innovation hubs act as selective intermediaries that structure access to funding, enable peer-to-peer learning, and broker legitimacy in governance interactions, while also reproducing uneven opportunity structures. Ecosystem maturity shapes these processes, producing distinct patterns of intermediation and capability development across contexts. The study contributes by proposing a microfoundational perspective on entrepreneurial ecosystems, reframing institutional voids as sites of institutional emergence, and offering comparative insights into how ecosystems evolve through aggregated entrepreneurial practices under conditions of institutional complexity.

Please choose your submission type: Developmental Paper

Primary Track: African Studies

Keywords: Entrepreneurial process & other spatial/temporal issues on African entrepreneurship.

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Philipp von Carlowitz