A View of Ecosystem Building: The Ecosystem of Incubators & Accelerators in Scandinavia and The Nordics. A Cooperation between Finland and The Basque Country

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest-growing modalities in the fields of business and economics, characterized by having a strong innovation and social impact-driven blueprint. Therefore, building proper and tailored-to-demand ecosystems is imperative to ensure both entrepreneurs and their offspring startups survive.

The objective of this dissertation is to understand why and how entrepreneurship is created, as well as, how to ignite it through proper ecosystem modeling, differentiate and identify the actors and factors that play a key role in ensuring entrepreneurial success, and how the latter differs from one regional cluster to another, in this regard, Finland and the Basque Country. Therefore, finding a linking point that enables the practice of exporting ecosystem- and entrepreneurship-related practices from one country to another driven by a collaborative ecosystem duality could benefit entrepreneurship regionally and internationally.

This thesis can be divided into both empirical research and theoretical frameworks. The empirical research focuses on giving a comprehensive analysis of the current nascent and already established conditions of the Finnish and Basque entrepreneurial ecosystems with a specific focus on ecosystem building and on the application of The Nordic Model in other entrepreneurially-strong ecosystems. Additionally, all the data collected and currently present in this thesis consists of secondary data.

The research successfully reveals a previously little-known executive map of the activity levels of two distant entrepreneurial regions and latitudes, and how diverse and distinct ecosystem models can foster collaborative international networks, distancing from the traditional models of primarily relying solely on local markets and fostering the improvement of global internationalization capacities.

These results are of great significance for both practice and theory and can be relevant for additional researchers, experiential marketing initiatives, public organizations, higher education institutes, entrepreneurship societies, and startups in Finland and the Basque Country.