Entrepreneurial ecosystems’ readiness towards knowledge-intensive sustainable entrepreneurship: Evidence from Brazil

Pathways to sustainable development are a key to providing innovation transitions and well-being. In this context, knowledge-intensive entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in shaping the markets for new products, services and business models. Prior literature has put emphasis on the contextual elements that shape entrepreneurial opportunities and business endeavors, i.e., entrepreneurial ecosystems. However, little is known about the extent to which these ecosystems are capable of nurturing the emergence of knowledge-intensive ventures with a sustainable orientation. Our goal in this article is to identify the ‘readiness’ of entrepreneurial ecosystems in terms of enablers of Knowledge-Intensive Sustainable Entrepreneurship (KISE) events in a developing country context – and how they differ from ‘traditional’ Knowledge-Intensive Entrepreneurship (KIE). Our empirical data comes from firms participating in the PIPE Program (Innovative Research in Small Business) funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation in Brazil. The methodological approach relies on the estimation of entrepreneurial propensity functions that assess the statistical associations between city-level features and the generation of KISE for a panel of 629 municipalities. Findings indicate strong similarities on the underlying ecosystem drivers of KIE and KISE. However, when we disaggregate KISE into four domains (Cities, Health, Education and Green Technologies), the ‘ecosystem readiness’ towards sustainable transitions varies from more mature (as in the case of HealthTechs with an inclusive orientation) to very incipient configurations (Cities and EdTechs).