Postgraduate research opportunities Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Knowledge Creation, Sharing, and Learning

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have become a prominent concept for researchers and policy-makers for regional economic development. There is a widely held belief in practice and policy discourse – and an assumption in most research writings – that vibrant EEs are the ‘secret sauce’ to fostering entrepreneurship, and, in particular, high-growth companies (scale-ups). The success of vibrant ecosystems such as Silicon Valley is often attributed to the fact that ‘there is something in the air’ that leads to innovation, despite recent evidence pointing towards strategic search processes as opposed to as serendipity and random encounters (Fitjar & Rodríguez-Pose, 2017).

At the individual/firm-level, these search processes and experiments are key entrepreneurial activities. Established practical blueprints that advocate learning through minimum viable products and other feedback-based mechanisms include the entrepreneurship heuristic (Ries, 2011), ‘disciplined entrepreneurship’ (Aulet, 2013), ‘value lab’ (Felin et al. 2021), and ‘test two, choose one: entrepreneurial strategy’ approach (Gans et al., 2021). These approaches have become mainstream in the pursuit of building start-ups and scale-ups, but this ‘important empirical reality’ has been largely decoupled from academic discourse. Through experimentation, entrepreneurs and firms create an emergent stock of ‘ecosystem knowledge’. However, the impact of EEs on supporting entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures through providing access to this knowledge is under-researched and under-theorised. What kind of knowledge emerges at the ecosystem level and how this is, in turn, transformed into firm-level competitive advantage (Tallman et al., 2004) are interesting and important questions to explore.

The successful applicant will be responsible for designing and leading a PhD research project under the supervision of experienced researchers. Drawing on, for example, entrepreneurial capital and social network theory, we welcome applications from candidates keen to pursue innovative approaches to empirical research (e.g., the use of mobile apps for data collection at the individual level or the use of novel secondary datasets) and/or formal modelling (e.g., the use of agent-based models for knowledge dynamics in ecosystems). The aim of the research is to develop new ways of conceptualising and/or measuring the influence and effectiveness of ecosystems through experimentation and organisational learning/business model innovation of the constituent entrepreneurs and firms.

The successful applicant will join a vibrant research community within the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship and the Centre for Doctoral Training in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. They will also become part of the Strathclyde Doctoral School community which connects doctoral researchers across the University and provides a central body for supporting the research environment and culture for doctoral researchers. The Hunter Centre is now one of the largest university-based centres of entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe and is home to a team of recognised experts and a large doctoral community. The Hunter Centre sits within the triple accredited Strathclyde Business School, ranked number one in Scotland in the REF2014. The Hunter Centre is committed to engaging in, and drawing from, world-class research to inform the design and delivery of a growing portfolio of useful learning experiences.