The role of smart specialization in providing regional strategic support for establishing sustainable start-up incubation ecosystems

Abstract

The ecosystem concept is rooted in biology, where it refers to a community of living and non-living components that interact with each other in a complex way (Acs, Stam, Audretsch, & O’Connor, 2017). The concept has been adopted by the sciences of economics and management, where it appears in several related guises, such as innovation ecosystems, business ecosystems, and entrepreneurial ecosystems (Rinkinen, 2016). The notion of a start-up incubation ecosystem, defined as a system of interdependent actors and factors which supports the creation and successful development of start-ups (Novotny, Clausen, Rasmussen, & Wiklund, 2018), is most closely connected to the entrepreneurial ecosystems approach. Since entrepreneurial ecosystems are a “critical tool for creating resilient economies based on entrepreneurial innovation” (Spigel, 2017, p. 49), regional authorities are advised to build an underlying support policy for creating and strengthening these ecosystems in the interest of economic development. To understand the role of regional strategic support in establishing sustainable start-up incubation ecosystems, it is logical to draw on observations from both the entrepreneurial ecosystems literature and the literature on ecosystem-based innovation policy. The ecosystem concept in economics and management theory can be viewed as related to biological ecosystems through the prism of emergence and complexity. Entrepreneurial ecosystems have some of the properties of complex systems as described by complexity theory (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014). According to Byrne and Callaghan (2014, pp. 17–38), complexity rests on a few simple assumptions: (1) complex systems are not designed top-down but are the result of self-organization by many autonomous, interrelated decision-makers; (2) complex systems have emergent properties in the sense that they have the capacity to change in