The School of Public Policy of Central European University cordially invites you to a guest lecture by:
Erik Stam
Professor at Utrecht University
Prof. Dr. Erik Stam will present the paper “Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: A Systems Perspective.” Ultimately, he will answer the question: To what extent is an open society also an entrepreneurial society (and vice versa)? There is growing interest in ecosystems as an approach for understanding the context of entrepreneurship at the macro level of an organizational community. It consists of all the interdependent actors and factors that enable and constrain entrepreneurship within a particular territory. Although growing in popularity, the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept remains loosely defined and measured. This paper shows the value of taking a systems view of the context of entrepreneurship. We develop a systems framework for studying entrepreneurial ecosystems, develop a measurement instrument of its elements, and use it to examine the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Netherlands. We measure the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystems with an index value comprising 10 ecosystem elements and measure entrepreneurial outputs with the prevalence of high-growth firms. We find that entrepreneurial outputs are strongly related to the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Strong interrelationships among the ecosystem elements also reveals their interdependence and need for a systems perspective.
About the Speaker
Prof. Dr. Erik Stam is Full Professor since 2011 and is currently the head of the Utrecht School of Economics (Utrecht University). Next to this he is co-founder and Academic Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship and founding board member of the Utrecht University Strategic Research Theme Institutions for Open Societies. He is a leading scholar on entrepreneurial ecosystems and interested in the societal and organizational contexts of entrepreneurship and how this improves the performance of firms and economies.