Meeting, mating, and intermediating: how incubators can overcome weak network problems in entrepreneurial ecosystems

Each entrepreneurial ecosystem is a site of intellectual cross-pollination between the ecosystem's participants, who share knowledge through both informal and formal networks such as incubators and accelerators.

“Importantly, each EE is a site of intellectual cross-pollination between the ecosystem's participants, who share knowledge through both informal and formal networks such as incubators and accelerators (Bank et al., 2017;Eveleens et al., 2017;van Rijnsoever, 2020).”

Recent years have seen an increase in investigations that treat entrepreneurial ecosystems as important drivers of how entrepreneurship develops.

“While early studies of (sustainability) entrepreneurship frequently focused on different personal traits of startup founders (Davidsson and Wiklund, 2001;Harris et al., 2009;Zahra et al., 2009), recent years have seen an increase in investigations that treat entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) as important drivers of how entrepreneurship develops ( Acs et al., 2014;Alvedalen and Boschma, 2017;van Rij”