Abstract
What makes innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems (I&EEs) successful remains insufficiently understood. Existing research tends to describe ecosystem success through structural features such as dense networks, geographical clustering, institutional support and treating collaboration, trust and shared identity as stable assets rather than ongoing accomplishments. Yet if these qualities are things an ecosystem continuously does rather than things it stably has, then they are also things it can stop doing. This paper argues that understanding how an I&EE functions, and why it may struggle to adapt, requires attending to the practice bundles through which coordination, meaning and identity are continuously produced. Drawing on practice theory and institutional logics in their recent practice-centric articulation, the study characterises Taiwan's bicycle sector as a historically evolved I&EE constituted by distinctive, interconnected practice configurations.
The analysis synthesises academic and industry literature with interviews conducted across three independent studies spanning 2014–2024, made available in part through collegial data sharing. Preliminary findings identify a range of emergent logics, each constituted by densely interconnected practice bundles that coexist, overlap and mutually reinforce one another. Together, these logics form a self-reinforcing configuration that has sustained the sector's extraordinary success over decades.
Yet the same practice configurations that produce ecosystem coherence simultaneously define — and limit — what is thinkable, legitimate and possible within the ecosystem. Despite Taiwan's parallel, world-leading capabilities in ICT and e-mobility technologies, cross-sector integration between the bicycle and technology ecosystems remains fragmentary, hampered by incompatible temporal rhythms, development expectations and professional identities rooted in fundamentally different practice bundles.
The paper contributes to I&EE scholarship by responding to calls for research on I&EE microfoundations by providing a practice-grounded account of how ecosystem-level patterns emerge from micro-level activities; it thus conceptualises the Taiwan’s bicycle sector as such and, finally, extends work on institutional logics in ecosystems by grounding logics explicitly in practice rather than treating them as abstract belief systems.