One of the themes of this year’s RSA Conference in Gothenburg was Entrepreneurship and Innovation Systems. This theme ran mainly across three sessions where participants discussed how firms, regions and public institutions generate innovation, and how support systems shape entrepreneurial activity. The presentations covered a range of countries, sectors and methods, from qualitative fieldwork to econometric analysis. A recurring challenge among the presentations was the distance between how innovation and business support are formally built and how they are operationalized.
The first session subtheme was on unlocking, supporting, and scaling growth. Work on innovation intermediaries and coworking spaces analyzed firms outside UK innovation hubs. They shared a few similarities in the way business support is scattered, and in most cases, it is up to the entrepreneurs themselves to rebuild support through informal networks and the shared spaces they trust. Furthermore, a study on open government data followed a similar point but from inside the public sector. Local authorities publish the portals and write the policies, but without internal roles and processes to maintain the data, openness becomes a challenge. This pattern is also evident in the last presentation of the session regarding public procurement. Despite how much of the economy scale-up firms carry, they secure only a fraction of direct procurement, and SMEs as a whole fare little better. Even with recent reforms, the bidding process for public contracts is too complex for most of these firms to navigate.
The second session focused on entrepreneurial ecosystems, and the decisions made within the firms themselves. Work on SME leadership treated management capability as a driver of productivity. The way owners make decisions, especially regarding the adoption of AI, does a lot to separate the firms that pull ahead from the ones that stagnate. In addition, a study of vulnerable youth entrepreneurs in Barranquilla —which I presented— joined the session’s discussion by contrasting the entrepreneurial ecosystem as designed by the institutions and stakeholders with the one those entrepreneurs actually experience. The study used participatory workshops to show where the two versions coincide or come apart. What connected the two presentations was the focus on managers and entrepreneurs. What firms and entrepreneurs do, and perceive, matters as much as the structures set up around them.
During the third session, the focus shifted to dynamics and diversity, widening the frame to who gets left out, and there were two presentations especially relevant. Research on disabled entrepreneurs in the UK asked how regions are experienced by people the standard frameworks tend to skip over, and argued their agency deserves far more room than it usually gets. A comparison of sustainable fashion firms in Poland and the Netherlands landed somewhere similar from a very different sector. Circular practices take shape around local conditions, founders’ values and where a firm sits in its market, producing many versions rather than one. In general, place and context have an important role in shaping how firms actually operate.
Overall, the three sessions offered a broad body of work on that was diagnostic and policy-facing. Studies looked at where innovation and entrepreneurship support systems fall short, whether in coordination, in reaching smaller firms, or in the internal capacity to sustain openness, and what might improve them. The presentations ranged from UK procurement and innovation intermediaries to entrepreneurial ecosystems and regional diversity, but a common thread was attention to what formal support systems miss, whether that lies in regional access, in overlooked entrepreneurs, or in the internal workings of the institutions themselves.
About the author
Paula Camargo Scoppetta is a third-year PhD student and researcher in Economics at Universidad del Norte, Colombia. She works on the WeEco project studying women entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ecosystems in Latin America, combining qualitative research with data science and computational methods.