Meeting Its Waterloo? Recycling in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems After Anchor Firm Collapse

Abstract

Entrepreneurial ecosystems are the localized actors, factors, and institutions that support the creation and survival of high-growth, innovative new ventures. Entrepreneurial recycling, the movement of ideas, resources, and people within ecosystems as firms exit the market, is seen as a crucial process underlying the evolution of ecosystems over time. However, there is limited empirical evidence for the existence, scale, and impact of recycling. This is particularly true about recycling of workers into a local ecosystem after the collapse of a major anchor firm in a region. As a result, it is difficult to predict if such a collapse will help an ecosystem by releasing talented workers into the labour pool where they can be picked up by fast-growing firms or if it will harm the ecosystem as these workers migrate to other regions or sectors of the economy. This paper addresses these questions through a novel methodology that uses data from employment-based social media platforms to look at the profile of workers who left smart-phone Blackberry after its decline in 2008. The paper shows how recycling processes change over time in response to institutional changes in the ecosystem and how the flow of workers from Blackberry aided its fast-growing entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.