Entrepreneurship & Regional Development

Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Leadership: Processes, Practices, and Contexts

Motivation for and objective of the special issue

In this special issue, an entrepreneurial ecosystem refers to an evolving, place-based configuration of interdependent actors, institutions, resources, and relationships that shape entrepreneurial activity and its outcomes (Stam, 2015; Spigel, 2017; Wurth et al., 2022). Interdependencies among these elements influence how resources circulate, collective priorities develop, and the ecosystem changes over time. Such interdependencies lead to variegated network structures. However, a recurring observation in this literature is the emergence of central and influential actors who assume leadership roles within EEs.

Yet, despite its ubiquity in EE assessments, leadership remains a contested concept. While it is frequently recognized by practitioners as key for EE success, we have little academic evidence on what it is (or what it can be) and how effective it is. It also seems a paradoxical phenomenon: no single actor is necessarily in the lead, yet EEs may still depend on collectively produced direction and coordination to enter virtuous cycles of development. Although there has been a surge of research on the intersection of entrepreneurship and leadership (see Leitch & Volery, 2017; Reid et al., 2018), EE leadership remains underdeveloped as a distinct area of research.

Questions about EE leadership arise across relatively stable, transforming, and crisis-affected ecosystems. Digitalization, sustainability transitions, and geopolitical change provide contexts for examining how leadership practices evolve. In some settings, these developments represent gradual transformation; in others, several disruptions interact and reinforce one another, producing conditions that may be understood as poly-crisis (Klyver & McMullen, 2025). These different contexts raise questions about who provides direction within EEs, how priorities are established, and how leadership practices vary with institutional arrangements and resource conditions.

EE leadership is a central, yet elusive element of EEs (Feldman, 2014; Wurth et al., 2023). Prior research refers to leadership through concepts such as orchestration, governance, intermediaries, and local champions (Colombo et al., 2019; Giudici et al., 2018; Harima et al., 2024), and through definitions of visible and committed entrepreneurial leaders embedded in a region (Feldman & Zoller, 2016), accessible entrepreneurs who actively “feedback” to the community (Sternberg et al., 2019), and EE architects (Dutta & Forbes, 2025). These insights remain fragmented and rarely integrated into a coherent theoretical framework. Furthermore, current theorization rarely examines how context shapes the meaning and practice of ecosystem leadership. Existing accounts often assume relatively stable institutions, predictable resource flows, and broadly compatible interests among ecosystem actors. These assumptions may not hold in regions experiencing institutional transition, geopolitical conflict, economic disruption, forced displacement, or rapid technological change. At the same time, leadership in established ecosystems should not be treated as context-free or inherently less complex, since EE evolution may itself depend on continuous work to maintain relationships, legitimacy, and access to resources. More context-sensitive theorizing is therefore needed to explain how ecosystem leadership differs across institutional, cultural, geographical, and temporal settings. As a result, leadership is often treated instrumentally rather than systematically conceptualized and empirically examined (Wurth et al., 2022).

This special issue advances the transdisciplinary EE research program by positioning EE leadership as a central, yet underexplored concept shaping ecosystem dynamics and outcomes across contexts (D’Oria et al., 2025). We conceptualize EE leadership as a relational process through which direction is developed, priorities are negotiated, support is mobilized, and the development of an EE is influenced. This conceptualization provides a starting point for the special issue. Given that EE leadership remains an emerging and fluid concept, we also welcome studies that develop, challenge, extend, or offer alternative conceptualizations, provided that they explicitly engage with leadership in entrepreneurial ecosystems. This view draws on shared and collective leadership research, which examines how leadership emerges through the interactions and joint influence of multiple participants (Zhu et al., 2018), leadership-as-practice, which focuses on the situated activities through which leadership is accomplished (Raelin, 2017), and process and relational accounts that understand leadership as the ongoing production of direction in organizing (Crevani, 2018). Leadership is analytically distinct from the actors who participate in it, allowing leadership activities and practices to become the focal unit of analysis. These leadership processes may involve individuals, organizations, groups, or configurations of actors, and may be formal or informal, concentrated or distributed. EE leadership connects individual and collective action with broader ecosystem structures and is primarily situated at the meso level (cf. Kim et al., 2016), where social groups, associations, and other collectives can be mobilized to improve the EE. In this respect, EE leadership plays a critical role in shaping the coherence of emergent networks of entrepreneurs and supportive agents, ultimately generating a sense of shared norms, values, and goals among key EE agents (Roundy et al., 2017; Santos et al., 2025).

Unlike prior work that focuses on ecosystem elements or outcomes, this special issue centers on leadership as the concept that links ecosystem structures to entrepreneurial behavior. By doing so, it advances entrepreneurship theory by offering new explanations of how opportunities are recognized, resources are mobilized, and ventures evolve within ecosystems. More broadly, the special issue advances entrepreneurship research by shifting the focus from static ecosystem characteristics to the processes through which direction is provided, priorities are shaped, and collective action is enabled, coordinated, and sustained. This perspective provides a foundation for explaining heterogeneity in entrepreneurial outcomes across seemingly similar ecosystems and for linking (macro) ecosystem-level conditions to micro-level entrepreneurial behavior.

Advancing our understanding of EE leadership is crucial for the development of the field for two primary reasons. First, from a theoretical perspective, the absence of a clear conceptualization of leadership limits our ability to explain how ecosystem structures translate into entrepreneurial behavior, leaving a central component of ecosystem dynamics under-theorized. Second, from a policy perspective, the limited understanding of leadership constrains the ability of policymakers and practitioners to design and support effective ecosystem interventions aimed at providing direction, fostering coordination, and sustaining ecosystem development.Themes and illustrative research questions

We welcome submissions that advance our understanding of EE leadership. To improve our understanding of how EEs function and generate outcomes (Stam & Van de Ven, 2021; Wurth et al., 2022), we need to shift the field from describing ecosystem structures to explaining how direction is provided, priorities are shaped, and collective action is generated, coordinated, and sustained over time (Feldman & Lowe, 2018; Hruskova, 2024; Bergman & McMullen, 2026). While EE research has largely treated leadership instrumentally, as a residual category of actors (e.g., local champions, intermediaries) or governance and orchestration mechanisms, without systematically theorizing leadership as a collective process distinct from individual leaders or formal positions (Harima et al., 2024; Roundy et al., 2018; Wurth et al., 2022), we need to further investigate who assumes leadership roles in EEs, how legitimacy and followership emerge, how lived experience and place attachment shape leadership (Roundy et al., 2025), and how different configurations of EE leadership can compensate for weaknesses in other elements such as fragile networks, limited resources, or institutional voids (Spigel, 2017; Stam & Van de Ven, 2021).  The special issue welcomes research on EE leadership across relatively stable, transforming, and crisis-affected ecosystems. A focus on crisis or poly-crisis is optional and represents one area of interest within this broader scope. Studies addressing poly-crisis should explain how interacting disruptions shape leadership processes. Research should also develop measures that capture EE leadership practices and processes (Leendertse et al., 2022; Wurth et al., 2022).

Below, we provide an illustrative and non-exhaustive set of research questions to guide future research on EE leadership. These questions indicate the broad scope of the special issue and are intended to encourage diverse theoretical perspectives and conceptualizations of EE leadership.

Conceptualization and theory

• What is EE leadership, and how can different conceptualizations—for example, formal, informal, individual, collective, organizational, distributed, relational, or processual perspectives—advance our understanding of leadership in entrepreneurial ecosystems?
• What dimensions or manifestations of EE leadership (e.g., public, entrepreneurial, community) can be identified?
• How does EE leadership interact with other ecosystem elements such as networks, institutions, finance, or culture?
• How does contextual uniqueness shape the forms and theorization of EE leadership across different institutional, cultural, and geographical settings?
• What elements of EE leadership affect how entrepreneurs and supportive agents cohere around shared norms, values, and goals?
• How does leadership manifest in groups of ecosystem participants and what relational characteristics (e.g., coordination, collaboration, communication) support effective ecosystem leadership?

Participation, legitimacy, and followership 

• Who participates in leadership processes in EEs, and through what mechanisms do legitimacy and authority emerge? How do other ecosystem actors recognize, support, contest, or withdraw from these leadership processes?
• How do the characteristics of ecosystems actors (e.g., lived experience, place attachment, prosocial orientation, and identity) shape their participation in ecosystem leadership?

Processes and dynamics

• What activities, practices, and processes constitute ecosystem leadership, and toward what collective goals are they directed?
• How are leadership activities distributed across ecosystem actors, and how do their interactions shape collective direction and coordinated action?
• How do different forms of leadership and agency emerge, evolve, and enable coordinated action within EEs?
• How does ecosystem leadership evolve across phases of development? What are the consequences of different forms of EE leadership?
• Under what conditions can leadership compensate for weaknesses in other ecosystem elements?

Leadership across transformation and crises

•  How does EE leadership differ across unstable, transforming, and crisis-affected contexts?
•  How is direction provided under sustainability pressures, digital transformation, geopolitical tension, or resource disruption, and how do leadership practices change when these pressures overlap?
•       How are competing priorities negotiated through EE leadership when ecosystems face simultaneous technological, environmental, political, or economic disruptions?

 Measurement of leadership practices and processes

•       How can the activities, practices, and relational processes that constitute EE leadership be measured and integrated into existing ecosystem measurement frameworks for comparative research?
•         How can network metrics be leveraged to assess the distribution of participation, influence, and coordination within EE leadership processes?
•       What measures can capture whether EE leadership is concentrated or distributed, formal or informal, and how these configurations change over time?

We encourage submissions of conceptual and empirical papers that can provide unique perspectives using diverse and novel methodological approaches, and interdisciplinary co-author teams. Research on EE leadership spans multiple disciplines, including organizational behavior, strategy, political science, and place-based leadership. However, EE leadership follows a distinct logic that cannot be fully captured within any single disciplinary perspective.

References

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