Strengthening Local Innovation and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

The complex adaptive systems that produce and sustain local innovation and entrepreneurship in particular geographic contexts are known as local innovation systems and entrepreneurial systems and, from a perspective informed by ecology, as local innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have increasingly focused on clarifying what these systems are and why they are important for local and regional economic development. There is relatively scant scholarship, however, focused on describing how to strengthen these systems, in terms of specific processes for developing missing or weak system components, improving the relationships between components and clarifying the purpose of the system. This paper describes an approach to innovation ecosystem strengthening developed from case studies of successful sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial ecosystems in the United States, and how this approach was adapted and applied to an online ecosystem-strengthening process in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on programmatic data and a post-project survey, we find that the approach achieved its primary objective of developing and launching an ecosystem-strengthening initiative, indicating its applicability beyond the context in which it was developed. However, we also identify that ecosystem capacity strengthening effects were weaker than predicted and conclude that this type of ecosystem-strengthening process is best suited to in-person work.