Abstract
The entrepreneurial ecosystem (hereafter EE) has recently gained considerable attention from academics, policymakers, and practitioners. Although the existing conceptual models in the literature on this critical phenomenon make a valuable contribution to understanding entrepreneurship from a process perspective, they miss explaining the complex structural relationships of the ecosystem and the cyclical process of entrepreneurship. This study adopts a relational perspective by following three-level, iterative systematic analytical stages with the help of MAXQDA to analyse 42 in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key EE stakeholders. Our findings signal some degree of toxicity embedded in the ecosystem's social, cultural, material and structural attributes. The discovery mainly contributes to the EE literature by reframing some silent but critical tensions and providing a renewed view of ecosystem relations through reticulating layers around entrepreneurs. This study also provides some insights into the attributes of emerging EEs, which are not entirely framed as overarching tension categories.