Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for Technology Start-ups in Nairobi: Empirical analysis of Twitter networks of Start-ups and Support organizations

Abstract

The literature on 'entrepreneurial ecosystem' places emphasis on understanding the surrounding business environment for entrepreneurial activities of individual actors in a system, typically defined at a city or regional level.This line of literature is still relatively new in development with potential to provide a useful framework for entrepreneurship policy.In this paper, we address some of the limitations of current research on 'entrepreneurial ecosystem' in order to advance our understanding of the construct.First of all, we draw our attention to connection and interaction between the elements of the ecosystem, which has received relatively little attention in previous empirical studies.Secondly, we address one important shortcoming of the previous studies -focus on the ecosystems in developed economies -in order to shed light on some peculiarities of development of entrepreneurial ecosystem in developing economies.Our current study attends to these issues with a relatively new methodology.We analyse networks of Twitter mentions of technology ventures and support organizations to study the interaction among the two types of central actors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Nairobi, Kenya.We argue that, for developing economies, which lack certain resources and formal institutions, support organizations of various origins can serve as a critical driving force in creating supportive entrepreneurial ecosystems.With an exploratory empirical analysis, we present interaction dynamics among start-ups and support organizations and identify two distinctive communities in the ecosystem based on the technological focus, the types of support organizations and interaction pattern in the network.

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