Acorns to Oak Trees: Designing entrepreneurial ecosystems for sustainability and diversity

“Let's manage entrepreneurial ecosystems the way ecologists manage habitats”—that is the challenge posed by Andreas Kuckertz. Yet the literature still lacks concrete guidance for actors who seek to build such habitats in practice. Addressing this gap, I present the Acorns-to-Oak-Trees (A2OT) framework, a design-science artefact that embeds ecosystem sustainability—defined here as the ability of entrepreneurial ecosystems to remain adaptive, inclusive, and supportive of a variety of venture types over time—into their structural design. Using Romme and Dimov's iterative design-science logic, I distil research on ecosystem configuration, resilience, and practitioner wisdom into four design principles: Diverse Seed Bank, Nutrient-Rich Soil, Supportive Climate, and Ecosystem Maintenance. These principles are coupled with a dynamic feedback-loop model and a Context–Agency–Mechanism–Outcome (CAMO) table that identifies actionable levers for policymakers, investors, and support organizations. This design science paper translates Kuckertz's ecological metaphor into a practitioner-ready framework, extending entrepreneurial ecosystem theory by making sustainability and entrepreneurial diversity core design objectives. It also illustrates how design-science methods can generate testable and actionable knowledge. The paper's key insight is that sustainability in ecosystems can be structurally designed by embedding mechanisms that support venture diversity, adaptability, and long-term resilience.