Culture in the entrepreneurial ecosystem: a conceptual framing

Entrepreneurial ecosystems are increasingly gaining traction as influential mechanisms that can enable entrepreneurial behaviour. In this regard, much work has been done with ambition to describe their key attributes and allay how we can successfully engage in their construction. As beneficial as contributions are, the discipline is at a point of inflection. A necessity exists to develop a strong theoretical base to ensure future work remains coherent and systematically consistent. The current paper attempts to begin the much-needed theoretical groundwork through focusing on one core aspect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem; culture. As a collective commonality of perspective towards how entrepreneurship is experienced and understood, culture has a lot to offer both in terms of theoretical and practical input. With this, a multi-level framework is introduced based on the concept of “cultural entrepreneurial ecosystem services” that embrace the dynamic interplay of various cultural ecosystem components. The framework developed has been designed to parsimoniously organise, clearly communicate, and efficiently capture, these services and their derived benefits.