I'm proud to announce that my new book on entrepreneurial ecosystems, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Theory, Practice, and Futures, was published this week. In this post I'm going to talk about why everyone should buy my book and why it deserves the mantle of "2020's ultimate beach thriller", but there's more! This week has also seen the publication of two other important books on entrepreneurial ecosystems. Investor and community builder Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway have published The Startup Community Way , the follow-up book to Feld's original ecosystems manifesto, Startup Communities. And just as excitingly, my colleagues Nicholas Friderici, Michel Wahome, and Mark Graham at the Oxford Internet Institute have published a new book, Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa: How a Continent is Escaping Silicon Valley's Long Shadow. I want to talk about how all of these books are worth reading by both academics like myself but also anyone who is interested in building stronger entrepreneurial communities and using ambitious entrepreneurship as a tool for regional economic and social development.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Theory, Practice, Futures by Ben Spigel (That's me!)
Buy my book! Buy my book!
But first, here's why you should buy my book. This is the first book in Edward Elgar's Entrepreneurial Footprints series, which is designed to give readers a quick tour through a new realm of entrepreneurship research. This book is designed to give an in-depth overview of what entrepreneurial ecosystems are, why they matter, what we know about them, and what we should know about them. It's designed to be read by anyone, no matter their familiarity with entrepreneurship research, economic geography, or regional development theory. While this is still a research book aimed at other researchers, I worked hard to ensure that it's accessible to anyone with an interest in the topic.
But the book is more than just a summary of what's come before. In the book, I make what I think are three important arguments about why ecosystems matter. First, the ecosystem concept brings together several key ideas in both academic debates about entrepreneurship and regional economies and several new practice trends in entrepreneurship. These are some of the most important new debates in the entrepreneurship research literature, such as high-growth entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial context (which itself just saw an amazing new book from Ted Baker and Frederike Welter).
But entrepreneurial ecosystems research is also one of the rare academic theories that incorporate new developments in practice as well, such as the impacts of lean business models and new general-purpose business technologies and platforms as well as changes in who are the prime movers in modern economic development policy. While entrepreneurial ecosystems represent a very broad and diffuse topic, this is a feature, not a bug. As I argue in the book, it's not just that entrepreneurial ecosystems allow us to answer questions about how to support entrepreneurs or how entrepreneurs build communities, the ideas underlying ecosystems allow us to ask entirely new types of questions and answer old questions in new ways.
Second, this book finally gave me a chance to develop my argument that learning is one of the most important processes in entrepreneurial ecosystems. This is something that I've been saying for a while, but haven't really had a chance to go into the depth I've wanted. But the nice thing about a book is that no one can stop me! A key fact about entrepreneurship is that there are no new problems. Most entrepreneurs face similar problems, such as identifying a market, developing a product, selling to customers, or hiring great employees. While there are differences between sectors and types of businesses, a lot of advice ("stay lean,", "As hire As, Bs hire Cs," "bad customers are expensive") applies to almost every entrepreneurial firm out there. This makes the ability of entrepreneurs in a strong ecosystem to learn from each other a crucial advantage they have over entrepreneurs in places with less dense networks of entrepreneurial knowledge. This is a big shift from how we've been approaching ecosystems, which is to try and identify and measure resources like skilled entrepreneurs, accelerators, or meetups. Focusing on learning provides an entrepreneur-centric view of how ecosystems actually support firm growth and innovation.
Finally, for me, the most interesting (and challenging) chapter to write was critiques of entrepreneurial ecosystems. This is a new field and there are without a doubt many issues, particularly around vague definitions of what ecosystems are and the lack of methods to understand how they support firm growth. But the more trenchant critiques are around ecosystems as a neoliberal project. Entrepreneurship as an economic development strategy puts a lot of risk on entrepreneurs and workers instead of the state, which can much more easily take that risk on. And for all that risk, there is precious little evidence that the wealth created by successful high-growth entrepreneurship helps society as a whole rather than just enriching those at the top. I don't resolve these critiques, but they are issues that researchers need to deal with head-on.
The Startup Community Way by Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway
That brings us to the second big ecosystem book that came out last week (at least in the UK): The Startup Community Way. Brad Feld is one of the big reasons why the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems have so much traction today. An investor and entrepreneur, Brad was one of the early movers in Boulder's entrepreneurial scene. His 2012 book Startup Communities brought attention to some of the most important core ideals of ecosystem building: the importance of bottom-up leadership from entrepreneurs themselves rather than top-down management from the state.
This new book builds on the first by reemphasizing these core principals and coming up with plans not for ecosystem building, but for ongoing ecosystem leadership and development. This is represented in a subtle shift in guidance away from the dictate that leaders should plan for the next 20 years to have a vision for at "least 20 years from today." This highlights the fact that it's not enough to build ecosystems, they must continually evolve in the face of both a changing society but also the changing needs of the community.
The big way the authors help ground this view is by really arguing that ecosystems should be seen as complex adaptive systems (CAS). There has been plenty of research that makes this point (see this paper by Mark Phillips and Paavo Ritala), But Startup Communities does a great job of breaking down what this view point actually means for those at the coalface of ecosystem development and entrepreneurial community building. From a research perspective, I've always been a bit sceptical of CAS approaches because it's not clear what it adds to our understanding of how ecosystems work. But the Feld and Hathaway provide a very grounded and practical perspective of how we should shift how we think about ecosystem building because of it.
Finally, for me at least (and I'm a pretty narrow demographic) the most interesting provocation in the book was on the relationship between the startup community and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The startup community is exclusively made up of entrepreneurs and their direct supporters — investors, workers, mentors, coaches, etc. The broader ecosystem is the support apparatus that surrounds these people, such as economic development officials, university technology transfer offices, managers of co-working spaces. These actors do support the entrepreneurial community, but it's not their main job or priority — the economic development department is also interested in bringing in new factories and the university TTO wants to licence out patents to a big global company.
A nested structure of structures, from The Startup Community Way
Beyond this are even bigger structures like the national innovation ecosystem (patent law, R&D tax credits), the economy, and society. This draws attention to the different goals at work in even small communities and allows entrepreneurial ecosystem or startup community builders to focus on what they can change and the most central actors. This emphasises that there is often too much attention on ecosystem policy rather than development.
Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa by Nicolas Friederici, Michel Wahome, Mark Graham
The last book of real interest to ecosystem builders that came out recently is Digital Entrepreneurship in Africa by some great researchers associated with the Oxford Interest Institute. A few great things about this book. First, it's open access! This is something that makes it useful for a much wider swath of the community than is normal for an academic book. Simply go to the book’s page and download the chapters that look most interesting to you.
The book draws on in-depth case studies from more than a half-dozen sub-Saharan cities, ranging from Johannesburg in South Africa to Maputo, Mozambique. Data was based on both the OII's fantastic data on the African digital economy as well as more than 135 in-depth interviews with local leaders and entrepreneurs. This book is a triumph of the importance of getting local knowledge and insight to understand the contextual factors affecting the economy and society.
The huge interest in ecosystems has created a big drive up 'upgrade' African economies through digital entrepreneurship, but there has been precious little work on the potential of this as both an economic development strategy and as a tool for social mobility. This book provides a very balanced and critical look at this phenomenon. They're able to cut through the hype over 'Silicon Savannah' to understand the real challenges facing entrepreneurship in developing economies as well as the opportunities. Chapter 5 on uneven ecosystems is a great guide for anyone involved in ecosystem building in less developed regions about the challenges they should expect to face. There are no easy solutions and entrepreneurship is not the only tool that needs to be used to adjust long-standing internal and external problems facing these types of economies.
What these books are saying
Three books in a week is a huge deal for both the research and practice communities interested in ecosystem building. It shows the importance of going in more depth on this topic than a single research article or blog post. There is a lot of bullshit in both the research side of things as well as the more practice-oriented world and there is a need to cut through the bullshit to get to what matters and what doesn't. Books are a great way of doing this because it allows you to get to the detail — either the great contextual detail achieved by hundreds of interviews or the from-the-coalface perspective of people who have been doing the actual work of community building for years. All these books are worth giving your attention in order to think about what the are biggest issues facing the world of ecosystem building and what is really going to matter over these next few, uncertain, years.