THE EFFECT OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEMS IN EMERGING MARKETS—A CASE STUDY OF MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY BANGLADESH

Discussions on entrepreneurial ecosystems have been a relatively recent addition to the corpus of entrepreneurship literature and have focused heavily on fostering aggressive growth, often technology-based, ventures. Here, we tune the ecosystem model to fit the non-technologically innovative entrepreneurial spaces of emerging economies. We propose a new framework for viewing the cultural effect on entrepreneurship through interactions between the individual entrepreneur’s identity, and networks within specific infrastructural and institutional regimes wrought by predominant culture. In applying the model to mid-twentieth century Bangladesh, we find a culturally predominant negative perception of entrepreneurial activity. We show this contributed to the growth of certain types of entrepreneurship in the country that were rife with (i) higher risk-tolerant behavior among entrepreneurs and (ii) the rise of entrepreneurs having strong links with specific social networks, which together led to an increase in institutional decay and the rise of corruption.