The missions of the associations that make up the entrepreneurial ecosystems

Abstract

The issue of entrepreneurial ecosystems is becoming increasingly important in the entrepreneurial literature. This work identifies the constituent actors and highlights their missions. Among these actors, non-profit organizations related to entrepreneurship are mentioned as actors of entrepreneurial ecosystems. However, there is no research that characterizes their missions and tries to understand how the specificity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions their emergence. We are therefore seeking to identify the missions pursued by non-profit organizations interested in entrepreneurship and business creation. We also seek to understand their context of emergence. Our results concern non-profit organizations but can be mobilized to understand the development of new actors within an entrepreneurial ecosystem. While there is a diversity of missions, we argue that the characteristics of the territory as well as the temporal dimension determine the missions. On the basis of the population of French 1901 law non-profit organizations, which declared in their subject matter the terms “création d’entreprise” or “entrepreneuriat” (business creation or entrepreneurship) over the period 1997-2016, and thanks to a methodological approach based on an automated lexical analysis, we identify five classes of missions: entrepreneurial interactions, management support, project support, social concerns, student entrepreneurship. The size, human capital or unemployment that characterize a territory have an impact on the type of mission. The latest periods indicate an increase of organizations whose mission is focused on entrepreneurial interactions and student entrepreneurship.