The role of entrepreneurship ecosystem in fostering startups growth: Insight from bahrain entrepreneurship ecosystem

Abstract

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have emerged as an important concept for understanding the context of entrepreneurship at the macro and micro level of an organizational community. It consists of all the actors and agents that enable and constrain business startups and new ventures within a particular context. This approach of entrepreneurial ecosystem is growing in popularity and has become the focus of government policies all over the world for its high potential to support high-growth firms and to generate entrepreneur-led economic development. A key player in this context of ecosystem is the government which is involved in a booster and policymaker capacity at the different levels of the new venture creation process, by providing different kinds of support for startups and high-growth firms to become self-sustaining. This paper explores the Bahraini entrepreneurship ecosystem and identifies the key government interventions by focusing on the following: policy intervention; government finance intervention and assistance and mentoring intervention. This study shows that a more granulated understanding of the policy-maker role in monitoring the development of ecosystems and boosting startups growth and sustainability is required, with particular consideration of the diversity of the contexts and the complexity of the interactions between all actors. A quantitative approach was used, through descriptive analysis in a population of 334 entrepreneurs. The findings from this quantitative study stipulate that it is important for policymakers to revise the policy intervention in order to improve its effectiveness with regard to startups growth and success. Greater consideration of the institutional context is needed so as to have a clear understanding of how policy schemes can better support entrepreneurial activities. Besides, the results demonstrate that financial schemes and assistance and mentoring programs pose formidable opportunities for startups and new businesses to create self-sustaining cycles of entrepreneurial innovation, growth, and success.