Leadership in startup communities: How incubator leaders develop a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem

Abstract

Purpose
Scholars are increasingly adopting an ecosystems perspective focused on the complex systems of factors that influence organizations. A type of ecosystem that is receiving significant academic and practitioner attention is the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE): the interconnected system of actors and forces that supports or hinders entrepreneurship in a geographic area. However, the role that leaders play in ecosystem development, particularly in unmunificent contexts, has received little attention. The purpose of this study was to investigate EE leadership and development and induce a theory explaining how it unfolds.

Design/methodology/approach
An inductive research design was combined with the case study methodology to analyze the leadership of an entrepreneurial support organization (an incubator) and its role in developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Findings
The findings revealed that incubator leaders constructed a dynamic leadership model that evolved as the EE developed and was tailored to the region's strengths and weaknesses.

Originality/value
The study contributes to research at the nexus of leadership and entrepreneurship by introducing a new level of analysis (the meta-organization), focusing on an underexamined leader type (the support organization) and emphasizing the interplay between leadership and regional characteristics.

Full text

Leadership in startup
communities: how incubator
leaders develop a regional
entrepreneurial ecosystem
Philip T. Roundy
Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of Tennessee (Chattanooga),
Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Scholars are increasingly adopting an ecosystems perspective focused on the complex systems of
factors that influence organizations. A type of ecosystem that is receiving significant academic and practitioner
attention is the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE): the interconnected system of actors and forces that supports or
hinders entrepreneurship in a geographic area. However, the role that leaders play in ecosystem development,
particularly in unmunificent contexts, has received little attention. The purpose of this study was to investigate
EE leadership and development and induce a theory explaining how it unfolds.
Design/methodology/approach –An inductive research design was combined with the case study
methodology to analyze the leadership of an entrepreneurial support organization (an incubator) and its role in
developing an entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Findings –The findings revealed that incubator leaders constructed a dynamic leadership model that evolved
as the EE developed and was tailored to the region’s strengths and weaknesses.
Originality/value –The study contributes to research at the nexus of leadership and entrepreneurship by
introducing a new level of analysis (the meta-organization), focusing on an underexamined leader type (the
support organization) and emphasizing the interplay between leadership and regional characteristics.
Keywords Entrepreneurial ecosystems, Leadership, Support organizations, Incubators, Startup communities,
Ecosystem development
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
[T]he glass ceiling that any community has toward building a technology-based ecosystem is
disbelief. It’s a community’s disbelief in that being able to be accomplished. [...] when we boldly
announced to anyone who would listen that we’re going to launch world-class software companies in
the global markets from a deserted downtown [...], the universal response of the community was,
“You cannot do that here.”(Executive Director1-Primary Interview)
We kept plugging at it. [...] We thought we had a good model. We scored little singles, and then we
started scoring doubles, and then we started hitting triples. And as this campus grew, as our
companies gained worldwide attention, that glass ceiling is absolutely shattered. It’s in the arts. It’s
in neighborhood development. [...] It is in every aspect of the city. It is baked into the DNA of the city
[...] I cannot tell you the last time I heard anybody in any field in this community say, “you cannot do
that [here]”(Executive Director1-Primary Interview)
The “ecosystem”perspective in business research has shifted scholarly attention toward the
connected and interdependent systems of actors, technologies and institutions that extend
beyond firm, industry and sectoral boundaries and shape organizational activity (Aarikka-
Stenroos and Ritala, 2017;Jacobides et al., 2018). A vibrant stream of ecosystems research
focuses on “entrepreneurial ecosystems”(EEs), defined as the interconnected systems of
forces that support or constrain entrepreneurship in geographic areas (Spigel, 2017;Stam,
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0262-1711.htm
Received 12 October 2020
Revised 31 December 2020
30 January 2021
11 February 2021
Accepted 17 February 2021
Journal of Management
Development
Vol. 40 No. 3, 2021
pp. 190-208
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0262-1711
DOI 10.1108/JMD-10-2020-0320

2015;Roundy et al., 2018;Velt et al., 2020). Studies of thriving entrepreneurial ecosystems in
cities and regions, such as Silicon Valley, Bangalore and Sydney, have found that
entrepreneurship is influenced by interdependent context-, location- and place-based factors,
such as investors, universities, governments, cultures and narratives (Adams, 2020;
Donaldson, 2021;Stam and van de Ven, 2019).
Even if regions possess the components of entrepreneurship (e.g. local investors), it is not a
sufficient condition for having thriving EEs (Breznitz and Taylor, 2014). Leadership, the
process of giving meaningful direction to collective efforts and inducing others to pursue a
common goal (Jacobs and Jaques, 1990;Karp and Helgø, 2009), is required to mobilize an
ecosystem’s components (Harper-Anderson, 2018;Miles and Morrison, 2020). How leaders
work together in an EE has been theorized to play a critical role in coordinating ecosystems
and improving their ability to support high levels of entrepreneurial activity (Roundy, 2020).
Although the budding literature on leadership in (and of) EEs is making strides in
clarifying EE leaders’roles, this work has several blind spots. As summarized in a recent
review, the EE literature contains “reference[s] to issues of leadership [and] governance [...]
but none clearly bring out how these particular aspects are accommodated, coordinated and
arranged within an entrepreneurial ecosystem”(O’Connor et al., 2018, p. 17). Assessments of
the literature have also noted that research investigating EEs and their leadership is often
conceptual (Spigel and Harrison, 2018), static rather than longitudinal (Cunningham et al.,
2019), does not emphasize support organization leadership (Harper-Anderson, 2018) and has
not focused on the coevolution, interdependencies and connections in EEs (Hakala et al.,
2020). EE research has also been slow to examine EE leadership in unmunificent contexts in
which the critical resources needed by organizations operating within the environment are
scarce (Castrogiovanni, 1991;Spigel and Harrison, 2018). As a result, it is not clear how
leaders, and particularly support organizations, influence EEs in resource-constrained
ecosystems where strong leadership may be most necessary (Miles and Morrison, 2020).
Thus, an important research question remains underexamined: how do support organization
leaders develop EEs in unmunificent contexts?
To address this question, EE leadership and development were analyzed in an inductive
longitudinal study based on interviews and archival data from an unmunificent context
(Youngstown, USA) and the EE’s primary leadership organization (the Youngstown
Business Incubator, “YBI”). The Youngstown EE represented a unique context to study
ecosystem leadership because, after deindustrialization, Youngstown’s business community
struggled to reinvent itself –an issue commonly associated with limitations in local
leadership (e.g. Safford, 2009). The findings clarify how an incubator (i.e. a support
organization focused on “accelerating the growth and success of entrepreneurial companies
through the provision of business support, resources, and services”;Markman et al., 2008,
p. 1406) stepped into a leadership vacuum and developed a dynamic leadership model that
coevolved (Abatecola et al., 2020) with the ecosystem.
This study makes three primary contributions. First, it expands the lens of leadership and
organizational development research from intraorganizational dynamics to meta-
organizations. Second, the study examines a unique type of interorganizational leadership:
EE leadership. Third, the findings call attention to the interplay between the refinement of an
EE leadership model and the development of a regional context. The study also contributes to
practitioners by identifying the strategies EE leaders use to overcome the challenges of
unmunificent environments.
Theoretical foundations
Leadership in entrepreneurial ecosystems
EEs are conceptualized as “meta-organizations”because they are networks of individuals
and organizations not bound by formal employment relationships but connected by shared
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system-level goals, such as improving a local community through the benefits of
entrepreneurship (Gulati et al., 2012). As meta-organizations, EEs exhibit a degree of
“bottom-up”self-organization (i.e. organization emerging without formal management) (Boal
and Schultz, 2007). However, EEs also are influenced by the deliberate actions of leaders who
explicitly attempt to develop ecosystems (Miles and Morrison, 2020). Indeed, academics and
practitioners often list strong leadership as a critical EE attribute (e.g. Isenberg, 2011;
Stam, 2015).
Leaders are involved in all major phases of an EE’s lifecycle (Roundy, 2019;Thompson
et al., 2018). For instance, Miles and Morrison (2020) studied the emergence of North Carolina’s
(USA) “Research Triangle Park”ecosystem and found that EE leaders, which included
entrepreneurs, government officials, and university members, had to use effectual thinking
because they were operating in a rural region without the common components of EEs.
Roundy (2020, p. 6) has argued that leaders influence EE coordination, “the degree to which
EE participants engage in explicit attempts to develop, organize, and promote an ecosystem.”
Roundy (2020, p. 8) theorized about specific, social-psychological leader and leadership-group
characteristics (collectivist orientation, group identification, empowering leadership style
and goal diversity) and explained how these characteristics influence a group-level construct,
EE leadership behavioral integration (i.e. “the degree to which EE leadership engages in
collective interactions based on collaboration, information sharing, and joint decision
making”). Thus, Roundy (2020) covered conceptual ground involving the general topic of
leadership and EEs and called attention to critical (potential) characteristics of EE leaders but
did not empirically test the proposed theory, discuss the impact of specific types of EE leaders
(e.g. support organization leaders) or identify how leadership activities impact ecosystem
development in unmunificent contexts. Instead, Roundy (2020) had a relatively narrow focus:
theorizing about the characteristics of EE leaders that influence their ability to work together
and, in turn, how group functioning influences an ecosystem-level outcome (coordination).
A specific ecosystem participant, the entrepreneurial support organization, plays a key
role in EEs because it often has the explicit mission of developing a startup ecosystem and its
entrepreneurs (Theodoraki and Messeghem, 2020). Research has primarily focused on how
support organizations assist entrepreneurs (Roundy, 2017;Theodoraki et al., 2018) and has
found that they act as brokers that connect entrepreneurs with resource providers, offer
entrepreneurship development programs and hold events in which entrepreneurs showcase
new products (Harper-Anderson, 2018;Spigel, 2016). However, support organizations’role as
EE leaders and their activities in unmunificent ecosystems are poorly understood (Goswami
et al., 2018). As described in the next section, the Youngstown EE provides an ideal context to
address these omissions in EE research and examine how support organization leadership
developed an unmunificent EE.
Method
Data collection and analysis were guided by an inductive research design focused on
addressing the research question and building theory (Locke, 2007). Inductive research
involves immersion in the research context and the search for emerging themes from
observations, rather than researchers being preconditioned by existing theory or outcomes
expected a priori (Woiceshyn and Daellenbach, 2018). The flexibility of an inductive design is
suited for studying leadership and ecosystem dynamics, which involve complex, evolving
and multi-level interactions (Fischer and Maggetti, 2017). To identify leadership activities, the
study focused on explaining process issues (e.g. how leaders’activities influenced ecosystem
development) (Langley, 1999). The inductive design was combined with an in-depth single
case study. The main advantage of the single-case method is that it allows for the study of
phenomena “at a fine-grained level of detail that cannot be achieved through multiple cases or
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other methods such as large sample statistical studies”(Ozcan et al., 2017, p. 93) making it well
suited for “questions examining how and why things emerge, develop, grow, or terminate
over time”(Langley et al., 2013, p. 1). The specific case (the Youngstown EE) was appropriate
because there was a large amount of longitudinal data available (primary and archival)
(Rojas, 2010), the context is widely considered unmunificent (e.g. Hobor, 2013) and EE
development is tied to a support organization.
Data collection and analytical procedures
The study period was 1995–2020, which encapsulated the incubator’s founding, the
refinement of its leadership model and its efforts to develop the EE. Data collection followed a
two-pronged approach based on interviews with EE leaders and archival data pertaining to
the incubator and EE. Informants were identified through snowball sampling (i.e. asking
informants to recommend other informants) and purposive sampling, (i.e. searching archival
documents for individuals and organizations that seemed to be major EE players). To
increase the breadth of insights, informants were selected from a wide range of EE roles
(described in Table 1). 16 interviews were conducted (Ba
skarada, 2014) including support
organization directors, employees, community and economic development staff, government
Interviewee; alpha-
numeric identifier Organization; title (title if changed)
Organizational tenure
(through 2019)
Interview type;
(number)
Executive director-1;
ED1
YBI; CEO (entrepreneur-in-residence) 1998-2019 Primary:
archival (6)
ED2 YBI; COO (CEO) 2011-2019 archival (2)
Board Member-1; BM1 YBI board member (former)
Technology incubator; CEO
(executive in residence)
2011-2019 primary
Staff-1; S1 YBI; policy/economic development
analyst
2015-2017 primary
Community
development
organization-1; CDO1
Community development
Organization-1; Executive Director
2009-2019 primary
CDO2 Community development
organization-1; Director
2010-2017 primary
Economic development
organization-1; EDO1
Economic development organization-
1: Development specialist
2014-2019 primary
University Member-1;
UM1
Local university; administrator 2015-2019 primary
UM2 Local university; faculty 2005-2019 primary
CDO3 Community development
Organization-2; Director;
entrepreneur
primary
Funder-1; FND1 Private foundation; President 2007-2019 primary
EDO2 Economic development organization-
2; Executive Director
2011-2019 primary
CDO4 Community development
Organization-3; Executive Director
2010-2019 primary
Funder; FND2 Private foundation; Director 2017-2019 primary
UM3 Local university; City and university
planner (Director of economic
development)
2014-2019 primary
GOV1 Governmental organization;
manager
2014-2019 primary Table 1.
Interview data
summary
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officials and university members. Interviews were semi-structured, 30–60 min in duration
and digitally recorded and transcribed within 48 h.
To complement and triangulate informants’claims, archival data were gathered from
numerous sources including local, national and international news outlets, magazines,
economic development plans and other sources (e.g. social media). Databases (e.g. ABI/
INFORMS) and manual searches were used. After honing the focus to YBI as the primary EE
leader, archival data were gathered about the organization, including website content, press
releases and social media posts. Primary interviews were complemented with eight
secondary interviews from archival sources. Together, interviews and archival data totaled
approximately 700 pages.
Data were analyzed using an inductive theory-building approach (Miles and Huberman,
1994). During coding, emerging themes were derived from the data, and a preexisting coding
frame (or codebook) was not used (Braun and Clarke, 2006). During the first passes through
each record, initial themes were coded. After coding, themes were abstracted and combined
based on similarity. As common themes appeared, data were recoded, and the consistency of
themes was assessed within- and across-informants using the “constant comparison and
contrast”approach (e.g. Fayard et al., 2017). Tentative theoretical explanations were
constructed with the themes from each record used to challenge or extend the working theory
(e.g. Strauss and Corbin, 1998). During this iterative process, the theory explaining EE
leadership and development (described next) emerged.
Findings
During the 20th century, globalization and technological advancements changed the
geography of steel production and lowered US demand (e.g. Archival record (A)-104). When
major layoffs and plant closures began in the 1970s, Youngstown’s undiversified
manufacturing base could not respond to the shifting economic conditions (Safford, 2009).
Over the next decades, Youngstown lost 50,000 manufacturing jobs and over 60% of its
population. The city experienced high unemployment and poverty rates, declining median
income, deteriorating infrastructure and out-migration as residents left in search of economic
opportunities (Harrison, 2017).
In response to the weakened local economy, Youngstown initially pursued an economic
development strategy focused on attracting large firms to replace legacy manufacturers.
However, lack of success with this strategy, in part because of deficiencies in community
leadership (Safford, 2009), caused local policymakers and residents eventually to realize that
the steel mills would not reopen and traditional manufacturing would continue to move
offshore. In the 1990s, community leaders pivoted from trying to lure large firms to a new
strategy. stimulating economic development by supporting entrepreneurship.
The genesis of the Youngstown business incubator (YBI)
The idea to create the Youngstown business incubator surfaced in the late 1980s as part of a
national movement to promote business incubation (A31). To create the incubator, local
leaders secured $1.3m in public funding and two floors of a downtown building (A31). YBI’s
executive director from 1998 to 2017 described the incubator’s early life.
[W]e started as an incubator disguised as an urban renewal project, which 90% of the incubators are.
Here’s an abandoned building, here’s some state or federal funding [...]. Let’s build an incubator.
(ED1-primary interview (PI))
As the director explained, YBI began with a generalist approach and did not specialize in a
specific industry or startup type.
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We really did not care [...] what type of company we worked with (ED1-AI4).
[...] we opened as a traditional mixed-use incubator [...] Look, here’s some cheap office space, here’s
a photocopier, here’s a fax machine, here’s your shared receptionist. Now go turn yourself into a
globally successful company. That model does not work anywhere, but that’s the model that
incubators still claim to use across the country. (ED1-AI6)
YBI’s generalist focus found limited success. Shortly after the director joined the
organization, he realized the incubator’s financials were in crisis.
Three days later [after taking the job at YBI] I called my old boss and I asked if I could get my job
back, because [...] the organization was on the verge of collapse. (ED1-PI)
Although the director remained at YBI, shortly thereafter the organization faced a major
funding (and identity) crisis. In 2000, Ohio created the “Third Frontier”technology
commercialization program. The director explained the implications.
When the Third Frontier passed, we all got called to Columbus [the capital] and told “if you want to
continue to receive your operating funds from the state, which at that point was about 75% of our
budget, you’re going to have to align yourself perfectly with the mission of The Third Frontier, and
that is commercialization of technology.”(ED1-PI)
YBI was given a July 1, 2001 deadline to shift to an entirely different incubation approach
focused on high-technology ventures (ED1-AI6).
Contextual challenges facing the incubator and its leadership
YBI leadership faced challenges that spurred the organization to innovate. YBI’s executive
director described his reaction to the organization having to revamp its focus.
I remember driving back from Columbus and thinking, oh shit, how do you do that in [...]
Youngstown Ohio. (ED1-PI) [...] We had no history whatsoever of launching tech-based companies.
(ED1-AI5)
YBI had to overcome several specific contextual obstacles including its university affiliate
not having a history of technology commercialization, the lack of technology companies and
venture capital in the region and the absence of a research-oriented hospital in the region that
could spinoff biomedical ventures. YBI’s director summarized:
When you look at [...] the typical drivers of tech-based startups, those drivers were non-existent in
Youngstown. [...] We did not have any indigenous technology companies located here (ED1-A60)
[...] [W]e’re Youngstown, we’re not Palo Alto [...] we do not have co-located in our community those
indigenous tech companies in mass that are constantly shedding engineers because they got startup
ideas. (ED1-PI)
An early YBI board member also highlighted the region’s obstacles.
Other ecosystems have universities at their core to keep deal flow coming, to cover patenting costs, to
prompt investment and offer graduate students [...] Youngstown did not have that [...] (BM1-
personal communication)
YBI leadership described a final challenge: the “complete disbelief by the general public”
towards entrepreneurship (ED1-A23).
[...] one of the biggest problems in Northeast Ohio was the level of disbelief that we have in
ourselves. When we announced to the world in 2001 that we’re going to launch world-class software
companies in the global markets from downtown Youngstown, the kindest thing that was said to us
is, “You’re joking, right?”Most frequent thing that was said to us, “You cannot do that in Northeast
Ohio. Those firms have to be in the Silicon Valley.”(ED1-AI8)
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Together these factors created an unmunificent environment for entrepreneurship. YBI’sEE
leadership model evolved in response to these contextual challenges.
A model of EE leadership development in an unmunificent environment
In response to the challenges facing the organization, YBI created a unique leadership model
aimed at developing the city’s stagnant EE. The themes corresponding to the six primary
activities that were the basis for the organization’s leadership model are described in the next
sections. The main insight of each theme for ecosystem development is summarized in a
proposition.
Supporting entrepreneurs with resources: Engaging in conventional incubator activities.
Although several aspects of YBI’s leadership model departed from traditional incubator
activities, some organizational activities aligned with typical incubators. For instance, like
many incubators, YBI sought to develop the EE by providing entrepreneurs with resources,
including access to operational (“back-office”) infrastructure and knowledge.
Basically, everything’s free. We do not charge for office space. We will buy [entrepreneurs’] office
furniture for them. We do not charge for utilities. We do not charge for bandwidth [...] We defer long
distance charges, postage charges, courier charges. [...] (ED1-AI4)
YBI offers these resources so that entrepreneurs have “very few operational costs, other than
trying to make payroll”(ED1-AI2). YBI covers entrepreneurs’costs until ventures reach “a
sustained level of profitability”(ED1-AI4). YBI also provides financial resources because,
until recently, there was limited local venture capital and entrepreneurs did not have access to
other sources of regional funding. Thus, YBI had to devise creative ways to help
entrepreneurs “launch [their] companies for free”(ED1-AI3).
The incubator’s current leadership explained how YBI also helped entrepreneurs acquire
knowledge about customers and markets.
One of the things that we do for [entrepreneurs] that come to us [...] is put them through what we call
“ugly baby sessions.”It’s a little bit like a Shark Tank, but different. The [...] sessions are really
focused on talking to customers, not investors. [...] It lets [entrepreneurs] sit down with people
anonymously. So they’re giving you feedback [...] so that you can understand from them whether or
not you’ve really got a product that they’d be willing to pay for [...] and whether or not there’s really
a market there that could sustain a business. (ED2-AI6)
The incubator’s first executive director contrasted YBI’s approach with how entrepreneurs
traditionally test their ideas.
Every single idea that comes through our front door comes through with an assumptive market. You
are assuming that there is an actual market for this product. We do not invest anything in an
assumptive market, I cannot get smart money to invest in an assumptive market [...] (ED1-AI5) [...]
And there’s really only two ways to move an idea from an assumptive market to a verified [market].
[Entrepreneurs typically] spend [a] year of their life, they build that product and they insert it into the
marketplace and hope to see it sell over and over again, because nothing verifies the efficacy of an
idea or a new product like someone willing to spend cold, hard cash on it. [...] And if we cannot verify
it, pivot. (ED1-AI3)
The findings suggest the following proposition about EE leadership.
P1. To develop an EE, ecosystem leaders support entrepreneurs through resource
provision.
Honing the leadership focus: Pursuing a narrow incubation strategy. Beyond assisting
entrepreneurs in ways common to incubators, YBI’s leadership model involved several
distinct activities tailored to the organization’s unmunificent environment. First, early in
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YBI’s history, leadership shifted from a model focused on attempting to develop the EE by
working with all types of entrepreneurs (i.e. a “shotgun”approach) to a strategy based on
assisting entrepreneurs in a specific startup niche: business-to-business (B2B) software. YBI
leadership explained how their eventual “narrowness of focus”(ED1-AI4) differed from other
incubators and made strategic sense for the organization and the ecosystem.
[...] one of the conclusions that we came to very rapidly is it would be a mistake for us to pretend we
can be good at everything that knocks on our door. [...] that is a mistake that incubators make. I have
[incubator] colleagues that say, “I do not care if [entrepreneurs are] nano-science, bio-science,
alt-energy, fuel cells, robotics, instrumentation and control, medical devices. We can make you world-
class.”I have not seen an incubator do that effectively. [...] Rather than being mediocre at everything
that knocks on our door and pushing out mediocre results [...] [w]e thought it far better to look for a
single technology [...] that makes sense for Youngstown Ohio and build our program from scratch
to service that single technology. (ED1-PI)
In seeking to be “world-class at one technology”(ED1-AI5), YBI’s leaders sought to find a
technology that fits with Youngstown’s unique resources and mitigated the city’s
limitations.
For several reasons, incubator leadership ultimately focused on supporting B2B software
ventures and creating “the most resource-rich environment in the entire country for [this]
specific type of company”(ED1-AI8). First, YBI leadership acknowledged that local
entrepreneurs were not creating ventures in a resource-rich EE, like Silicon Valley or London.
However, as YBI leadership explained, with B2B software a venture’s physical location is not
as relevant as in other sectors (e.g. business-to-consumer ventures).
[...] unlike many, many industries [...] the location of a software company has always been
irrelevant. No one rules in or rules out the purchase of software because they like or dislike the
physical location of the provider. It’s not part of the buying equation. There is not a software
company anywhere in the world that the customer travels across the country, drives up to its front
door to knock on it and ask for the help desk. (ED1-PI)
YBI leadership promoted the idea that Youngstown actually presented entrepreneurs with
distinct advantages, such as lower costs, compared to more established EEs.
[...] why were people persistently thinking, “If you’re going to be a successful software company,
you’ve got to be in the Silicon Valley”? [In Silicon Valley] office space is as much as 150 bucks a
square foot. [...] When it’s $8 [a square foot] in Youngstown, Ohio. And your $193,000-a-year
software engineer in Silicon Valley [...] she’s $50,000 or $60,000 [...] in Youngstown. She’s every bit
as smart as your engineer is and she’s living in a way bigger house than your engineer could ever
dream of in Silicon Valley. (ED1-AI5)
YBI leadership also focused on B2B software entrepreneurs because of their low startup
costs. Limiting costs was critical because the lack of local venture capital meant that most
entrepreneurs were unlikely to receive external investment (ED1-AI4).
When it comes to a B2B software company, that is the cheapest capitalization of any startup I know.
[...] Extremely fast to succeed or fail [...] Now had we chosen medical devices, which makes no
sense for Youngstown, Ohio, after [the entrepreneur] raised $50 million, burned through $50 million,
six years later, I still only have three employees, and I do not even know if I can [get] through clinical
trials. [With B2B software] you and I together, with almost no money, in six to nine months, we know
exactly what you’ve got. Dirt cheap to start [...] You fail, you pivot (ED1-AI5)
P2. To develop an EE, leaders hone the focus of ecosystem leadership.
Embracing innovative practices: a “no graduation”approach. In addition to creating “the
most resource-rich environment in the entire country for a specific type of company”
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(ED1-AI8), YBI’s leadership developed the EE through innovative activities. Unlike many
incubators, YBI instituted a “no graduation”policy.
[...] we do not graduate our clients. We think that is a huge, huge mistake. We think that is the
Achilles’heel of incubation. [...] (ED1-PI)
[T]he model of incubation that’s employed almost everywhere in the country is that you grab a group
of companies, you incubate them, you accelerate them and then you go randomly scatter them across
your geographic region and tell them they have to work –again alone, in isolation –as an
underfunded early stage startup. [...] You’re often sentencing your graduate to death by graduating
them. (ED1-AI2)
YBI leadership stated that focusing on graduation often only delays an entrepreneur’s
inevitable failure and “lengthen[s] the time to death”for a startup (ED1-PI). The executive
director gave a vivid description of a common scenario facing entrepreneurs who graduate
before establishing solid financial foundations and must operate without the incubator’s
support network.
[W]hen you graduate that company [too early], [...] That incubator graduate knows she’sgoing
to fail. And her [spouse is] breathing down her throat. “What are we going to do for that three
years you spent in that stupid incubator? You gave up a $125,000 a year job and you maxed out
our credit cards. You put a second mortgage on our house. You borrowed $50,000 [...]Do
something.”What does [the entrepreneur] do? In desperation to save her personal finances, [...]
she takes her absolutely elegant technology and for pennies on the dollar to its true valuation,
in desperation sells it to a [...]companywhosays,“fire all of those people in Youngstown Ohio.
I was not acquiring them. All I wanted was the damn technology and I just stole it from you.”
(ED1-PI)
Instead of graduation, YBI focused on retaining entrepreneurs on their multi-site campus
while transitioning them “from incubation to acceleration to becoming a commercial tenant”
(ED1-PI). YBI’s criteria for if a venture receives free services or pays rent is clear: as long as
entrepreneurs reinvest profits back into their ventures, they can continue receiving free or
discounted office space; however, if founders take more than a nominal salary, the incubator
charges market rates for office space (A107). YBI leadership described this approach and how
it created profits that were reinvested in startups.
Because number one, why would I ever want to graduate a revenue stream? [...] On our first four
[incubator] buildings, there are no mortgages. There is no debt. We are over 85% occupied at
commercial rates. What do we do with the commercial real-estate profits? We invest them in our
startups. So we have our own funding mechanism. (ED1-PI)
What do I do with the real estate profits? I’ll invest in your idea before anybody in the country will, I’ll
invest in your idea at the idea stage. (ED1-AI5)
P3. To develop an EE, ecosystem leaders embrace innovative practices for assisting
entrepreneurs.
Establishing the EE’s social networks and culture: Creating a “collaborative cluster.”By
not graduating entrepreneurs and, instead, transitioning them to incubator tenants, YBI
created a dense cluster of co-located B2B software talent. YBI leadership explained how
this cluster benefited EE development. The “incubator is not an end, it is simply a means
to what’s most important”–creating a “hyper-cooperative cluster of immensely talented
and creative people”by having entrepreneurs co-located on a connected campus
(ED1-AI5)
[W]hy would I want to graduate and scatter all the talent our companies have that they’ve acquired?
[...] [W]ithin a 30-s walk of wherever you stand on our campus, all of our buildings interconnect [...],
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there’s almost 500 people working at our digital companies. On our campus, we know every
programming language [...]. Do you want UI/UX experts? We’ve got them. You want to talk to
channel resell strategists? We’ve got them. If you want to talk to SEO experts, we have them. You
want to talk to growth experts? We have them. All pledged to help you, the one-person startup [...].
That’s an extraordinary network that’s 30 seconds away from you. (ED1-AI5)
In addition to providing physical space for entrepreneurs, YBI also established a culture to
govern how entrepreneurs work together in the incubator and the EE. YBI leadership
promoted prosocial behaviors and norms such as collaboration, cooperation and trust by
making entrepreneurs pledge that after progressing from incubation to incubator tenant they
would “continue to help the one-person, the two-person startup that came through [YBI’s]
door after [them].”(ED1-AI6).
Now the rule is: to come onto our campus, you are going to participate in the cluster, you are going to
share your knowledge, you are going to share your talent, you’re going to share your resources. [...]
the cluster comes with rules, do not you dare hire someone else [working for another incubator
company] as an employee [...] do not you dare steal an idea [...] (ED1-AI5)
Our number one [rule], we expect you to give back. [...] We expect you, when I need an SEO expert,
when I need a brand strategist, when I need a Python coding expert, I can go to one of my companies
and say, “Come on, let’s go have a beer after work. I got [an entrepreneur] I need to talk to you.”
(ED1-PI)
Although the incubator’s rules are informal, the executive director explained the
consequences of violating the cultural norms set by YBI leadership.
Now, legally, we cannot require [following the informal rules] [...] but we can choose to non-
renew your lease. And in 15 years, we’ve only had to do that one time. [...] The only bad
incident we had was employee theft. One of the founders [...] thought he could out-engineer our
rules, hired somebody else’semployee,andwesaid,“That’s it, we cut off services today, your
lease is up in three months, we’re not going to renew it, start looking for [a new] space.”
(ED1-AI5)
YBI leadership summarized the characteristic required for successful ecosystem culture –
selflessness –and how having a large campus of entrepreneurs working on similar ventures
produced a “synergy”(ED1-A36) and repository of “institutional knowledge”(ED1-AI4) that
created an environment ripe for social learning.
“What’s the most important ingredient for success? Selflessness. We need to instill selflessness in all
that we do in our daily lives. It should not be about who does what or who gets credit for what is done.
It should solely be about just getting it done. Period. (ED1-AI1)
We’re all doing the same thing, we’re all facing similar problems, and we all learn from each other’s
experiences and mistakes. (ED1-A36)
Expanding the EE’s resources: engaging the “Youngstown diaspora.”To increase
connectivity to resources outside the EE, YBI leadership invested in a social network
that extended beyond the incubator’s physical campus and the city of Youngstown.
Beginning with the layoffs and plant closures in the late 1970s, Youngstown
experienced significant population losses. YBI leadership explained how they realized
that the city’s lost population represented a latent resource that could be harnessed to
develop the EE.
Seven years ago [2009], we started to ask a really critical question that I think communities like
Youngstown need to ask [...]: what happened to our very best, what happened to the very brightest,
who grew up in what we call “here”?So“here”is 25 miles in any direction from our campus [...]
(ED1-AI5)
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In searching for former residents, YBI leadership focused on locating specific types of
professionals that left the city as part of the “Youngstown diaspora”(Rhodes and Russo,
2013). YBI leadership described this strategy and how it benefited entrepreneurs.
We concentrated on angel investors, venture capital, computer hardware, computer software.
We just closed a $1.85 million investment in one of [YBI’s] startups, led by a Los Angeles
investor at $500,000, he syndicated the rest of the deal for us. [...] [his] mom and dad still live in
Youngstown [...] $7 billion worth of venture capital is managed by someone from Youngstown,
Ohio. (ED1-AI5)
YBI leadership identified and mapped over 10,000 people to create its diaspora network that
they “cultivate on a daily basis [...] that we introduce on a daily basis to the one-person
startup who needs to talk to that person in [the network]”(ED1-AI5). YBI leadership also
emphasized the geographic dispersion of the city’s diaspora network.
[W]hat surprises a lot of people [...] is our third largest network city [...] is New York City. Our
fourth largest is San Francisco in the Silicon Valley. Our fifth largest is Chicago, but we have
substantial numbers of extremely talented people [...] who live and work in Seattle and Portland and
LA and Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Denver, Atlanta, Boston, Tokyo, London, Tel Aviv [...]
[we] can tell a one or two-person startup company, we’ve got immensely talented people from Tokyo
to Tel Aviv that would like to help your business for free. (ED1-AI6)
This is such a powerful network that we think we can open just about any door in the country. [...]
it’s been quite a while that one of our portfolio companies have come to us and said, “[...]Ireally
need to talk to somebody”that we couldn’t make that introduction. And that is where we really,
really shine that we can put this external network under the one or two person startup company
(ED1-AI3)
YBI leadership reiterated the importance to EE development of creating a network of
entrepreneurial talent that resides outside the community but has strong connections to it.
[E]very community needs to engage its lost nation, its diaspora, the really creative, talented folks that
grew up in the community and, for whatever reason [left]. (ED1-AI5)
P4. To develop an EE, leaders strengthen the ecosystem’s social networks and culture.
Promoting an EE vision: creating a regional mindset. The final set of activities in YBI’s
leadership model involved promoting a common vision for the EE that conceptualized it as a
regional asset. Instead of defining Youngstown’s EE narrowly, with the city or county limits
as its borders, YBI leaders viewed the ecosystem as including regional assets existing outside
Youngstown’s borders.
[...] we consider a “corridor of opportunity.”We are a one-hour drive to either major city [Cleveland
and Pittsburgh]. When we looked at the educational assets in that corridor, we had [...] you’ve got
over 30 universities that grant at least a four-year degree in CS [computer science], 14 have masters
programs, and there’s eight PhD programs in [CS] in the corridor. In terms of density of CS talent
coming out of our university system, Youngstown resides in one of the densest corridors in the
country. (ED1-PI1)
A member of YBI’s university affiliate explained the regional EE mindset in more detail.
[...] draw a 70-mile circle around Youngstown and [count] the number of people, the number of jobs,
the number of Fortune 1000 companies, the number of parks, the number of miles of bikeway. [...]
this is a regional asset. [...] We recognize we operate as a region. (UM2-PI)
YBI’s director explained how this mindset has expanded the ecosystem’s footprint, which has
grown beyond the city’s physical boundaries.
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For our entrepreneurial signature program, the program that supports our technology-based
businesses, we have about a total of a hundred portfolio companies across the 21 counties in
Northeast Ohio. So remember our footprint is not just Youngstown in the Mahoning Valley [the
original EE footprint] (ED2-AI7)
P5. To develop an EE, leaders promote a clear ecosystem vision.
Maintaining leadership flexibility: Being alert to new opportunities. As YBI and the
ecosystem evolved, the organization maintained flexibility within the general framework of
its leadership model. As opportunities emerged, YBI expanded its focus and the ways it
sought to develop the EE. For example, as the organization’s capabilities deepened, YBI
leadership widened its focus from B2B software to a broader set of digital ventures.
We’ve changed [from] B2B software to what we call “digital”now. We will do B2B. We will do B2C,
we’ve broadened it to really include anything that’s digital. (ED1-PI)
Beyond expanding their focus to include a more encompassing definition of “software
technology,”YBI has responded to emerging opportunities in Youngstown’s EE in the past
decade by promoting entirely new types of entrepreneurship not strictly related to software.
For instance, in 2012, the city was selected for a publicly funded 3D printing accelerator that
eventually located on YBI’s campus. YBI’s director described responding to this opportunity.
[W]e started off strictly as a business to business software incubator, really looking at a very narrow
space. As the community’s needs have changed and as opportunities have changed, we’ve expanded
that mission to include startups and additive manufacturing, supporting the adoption of additive
manufacturing. (ED2-AI7)
As YBI and the ecosystem have grown, the incubator has also expanded its focus to assisting
different types of entrepreneurs and developing neglected parts of the EE.
[YBI now has] programs to encourage entrepreneurship within the minority community, with
women, with veterans and are now trying to find ways to build into student entrepreneurship.
(ED2-AI7)
Thus, as YBI’s capacity has increased and in response to new environmental opportunities,
YBI relaxed one aspect of its leadership approach (pursuing a narrow strategic focus).
P6. To develop an EE, ecosystem leaders maintain leadership flexibility.
YBI’s leadership model and EE development
There is evidence that YBI’s leadership model has indeed developed Youngstown’s EE. In 2019,
YBI had 75 ventures in its portfolio, which generated $43m in annual revenues and attracted
$49m in investments in the past four years (ED2-A57). One study estimated that the direct
impact of YBI’s activities was 610 new jobs, $76m in sales and $23m in wages. (A31-A114).
Incubated companies have also experienced high profile successes, which have generated
positive outcomes for YBI and the local EE. YBI leadership described one notable company.
Our first home run was a company called Turning Technologies [...]. They went from just an idea in
2003, by 2007 Inc. magazine ranked them as the fastest growing software company in the country.
(ED1-AI3)
Talisman Group, which is their VC funder, [a] private equity fund, acquired a controlling stake in
Turning in 2008 [...] Owned the company [...] and then [...][sold] it to a billion-dollar private equity
fund [...]. Not one job ever left Youngstown, Ohio. Two years ago, Turning just paid $70 million to
buy their largest competitor, which is in Scottsdale, Arizona, and move all the jobs to Youngstown.
(ED1-AI5)
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A former YBI board member explained how the success of Turning Technologies helped to
change the perceptions of what was possible in the EE, which, in turn, bolstered the
incubator’s diaspora network and validated YBI’s leadership model.
In a community [...] that produced very little deal flow 10–15 years ago (virtually none), Turning
really made people believe locally that success was possible and it gave credibility to [YBI director’s]
PR. The two went hand-in-hand and word caught on in the national press and in the mailing list of
Youngstown ex-pats. (BM1-personal communication)
YBI’s success in attracting another company also had material and symbolic effects.
This is the other reason to find your diaspora: [...] There was a six-employee startup funded by one
of the wealthiest startup families in San Francisco. The CTO is from Youngstown. [...] We brought
them from San Francisco to Youngstown. We rapidly incubated and accelerated them from 6 to
about 30 employees in just 22 months. A year ago, they were purchased by the second largest
financial services [...] company on the planet [...] (ED1-PI)
Because of YBI’s successes, the incubator has received acclaim from external evaluators,
which has helped to legitimize its leadership model and the EE. In 2015, for example, the
incubator was named the “#1 University Affiliated Incubator in the World”(UBI Index of
Stockholm Sweden; A68). The incubator’s successes have helped to change EE participants’
negative perceptions of the region. As the director explained:
[...] we have proven repeatedly that you can launch world-class software companies from
Youngstown, and it’s got a lot of people believing they can do anything from Youngstown (ED1-AI8)
[...] had we not had Turning named [...] the fastest growing software company in the country, we
very well may have run out of steam. [...] Turning was the undeniable, third party validation of YBI
and our model. And they put the nail in the coffin of overwhelming, community-wide
“disbelief”...that we could not launch world-class software companies into global markets from a
practically deserted Downtown Youngstown. [...] until a community totally rids itself of the belief
that “you cannot do that here”...you’ll never be able to do it there. (ED1-personal communication)
Overall, YBI’s director summarized the main outcome of the organization’s efforts to develop
the EE.
I think if there’s anything that I am most proud that this organization did, was I think we were very
instrumental in shattering an endemic disbelief in themselves [that] people believed here. (ED1-A31)
Discussion
How do entrepreneurial support organizations lead and develop EEs in unmunificent
environments? To address this question, this study focused on the leadership of a technology
incubator. The main finding was that incubator leaders formulated a dynamic leadership
model based on distinct social, cognitive and cultural activities that evolved as the EE
developed. Figure 1 summarizes the findings and propositions and depicts a theoretical
model of EE leadership and development with implications for research and practice.
Contributions to research and practice
This study answers the call to analyze the linkages between EE leaders, leadership processes
and ecosystem outcomes (Miles and Morrison, 2020;Roundy, 2020). In doing so, the findings
expand the focus of leadership and management development research to the meta-
organization and, specifically, the ecosystem. Although research is beginning to examine
leadership outside organizational boundaries, most studies still focus on intraorganizational
dyads, groups and teams (Kotlyar et al., 2015). As this study illustrates, leadership can extend
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beyond traditional firm boundaries and involve leading loosely connected individuals and
organizations in a regional EE. The findings explain how a single organization’s leadership
can help to develop a geographically concentrated community of individuals and ventures
across industry and sectoral boundaries.
Leadership research is devoting attention to the importance of context (Mittal and Elias,
2016). The study’s findings affirm the critical role played by contextual features (regional
attributes) in shaping an EE leadership model. YBI’s leadership activities evolved with
changes in Youngstown’s economy and community (e.g. the incubator shifted from a
generalist-, to a specialist-, to a generalist-focus as the EE developed). The findings suggest a
dynamic interplay between the socio-economic features of a region, the leadership model that
manifests and EE development. Further, this study enriches theoretical work on EE leader
characteristics (Roundy, 2020) by providing an empirical study of EE leadership in a specific
organization and ecosystem. Instead of focusing on the socio-cognitive characteristics of EE
leaders (Roundy, 2020) or the connections among ecosystem leaders (Harper-Anderson, 2018),
this study identifies a specific set of leadership activities and explains how these actions
influence (and are influenced by) EE development.
The study also draws attention to a specific type of leader that has received limited attention
in EE research: the entrepreneurial support organization. There is a growing prevalence of
incubators, accelerators and business development centers in high-income and less-developed
economies (Albort-Morant and Oghazi, 2016). The findings indicate that support organizations
do more than provide entrepreneurs with resources. They can lead EEs. In the coevolutionary
view, “the majority of [a] population suppresses all efforts to change and protects established
practices, while isolated populations create innovation and cause change in bursts”(Hakala
Figure 1.
A theory of
entrepreneurial
ecosystem leadership
and development in an
unmunificent
environment
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et al., 2020, p. 22). In contrast, YBI leadership were active change agents focused on
transforming mindsets, altering the community’sstatusquoandimprovingtheEE.
The study details how EE leadership manifested in an unmunificent context. Research has
emphasized EEs in thriving contexts but has devoted significantly less attention to EEs in
struggling regions (Adams, 2020;Walsh and Winsor, 2019). The lack of attention to
unmunificent EEs is important because resource-endowed EEs, like Silicon Valley are rare
and arguably the exception to the rule (Audretsch, 2019). Thus, important insights can be
generated by studying EEs, like Youngstown, which lack the characteristics of high profile,
but less common, EEs.
In most EE studies, “leadership”is listed as an important characteristic of high-
functioning ecosystems, but studies rarely define leadership or identify specific leader
activities. As a result, EE leadership has remained a nebulous concept largely divorced from
the leadership literature. This study provides a rich conceptualization of EE leadership and
connects it to leadership studies. Specifically, the findings are consistent with other studies
(e.g. Miles and Morrison, 2020) suggesting that EE leadership is not based on formal
leadership roles or responsibilities but is a form of collective leadership (Swensen et al., 2016).
Any person or organization in the collective (the ecosystem) can assume the mantle of EE
leader. The complex interplay between EE leadership and ecosystem components also aligns
with research conceptualizing EEs as complex systems (Phillips and Ritala, 2019) and
theorizing that ecosystems emerge and function as communities of entrepreneurial activity
that are not only complex but adaptive (Nair et al., 2020). However, beyond demonstrating
that ecosystems exhibit the characteristics of complex systems (e.g. Haarhaus et al., 2020),
this study’s findings suggest that EE leadership is a form of “complexity leadership,”
leadership in and of the dynamics of complex systems (Uhl-bien and Marion, 2009). For
instance, the finding that EE leaders craft and communicate a common vision for the
ecosystem aligns with the argument that strategic leaders influence complex systems
through their shared sensemaking and sensegiving activities, which involves creating
dialogues and storytelling (Boal and Schultz, 2007). Unlike prior work, the findings illuminate
how both collective and complexity leadership manifest outside the boundaries of traditional
firms in communities of organizations. In this way, the findings contribute to work studying
leadership in other forms of meta-organizations, such as clusters (e.g. Sydow et al., 2011).
However, further research is needed to compare and contrast EE leadership with constructs,
such as entrepreneurial leadership (Leitch and Volery, 2017), which are also at the nexus of
entrepreneurship and leadership.
Finally, the findings suggest that leadership is especially necessary in resource-
constrained EEs, which struggle to develop, in part, because of leadership voids.
Developing effective leadership activities requires that EE leaders identify their
ecosystem’s strengths and weaknesses and develop a leadership approach that
leverages and/or circumvents these characteristics. For instance, although there are
benefits to promoting EE diversity, support organization leaders in unmunificent EEs
may initially benefit from focusing on a subtype (or niche) of new ventures rather than
taking a “shotgun”approach to EE development. As an unmunificent EE gains resources,
EE leaders can adopt a more generalized focus and support other entrepreneurship types.
While there is unlikely to be a “one size fits all”approach to EE leadership, the findings
suggest several practices and activities that are likely to benefit EEs, such as promoting
prosocial behaviors, cooperation and selflessness among EE participants.
Limitations and directions for future research
The study’s limitations suggest future research directions. First, although the single case
method has advantages (e.g. producing rich descriptions of complicated social phenomena),
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the methodology also has limitations, most notably its generalizability. The findings are most
likely to generalize to EEs in regions similar to Youngstown –unmunificent environments in
high-income nations that lack the common components of vibrant EEs. It is not clear how the
findings generalize to other contexts, such as emerging economies. To improve
generalizability, future research should use a comparative case approach to study regions
with different economic and cultural characteristics to determine if the EE leadership model
identified in this study applies to diverse contexts and if some EE leadership activities are
more important for ecosystem development than others.
Further, this study adopted a process focus aimed at teasing apart the processes by which
leaders developed an EE in an unmunificent context. The study did not, however, address
variance questions (e.g. were EE leaders more effective than leaders in other EEs?). Future
studies are needed that adopt a variance-based design to explore the comparative
performance and differences in EE leadership.
Finally, EEs are increasingly viewed as engines for economic and community
development. However, EE researchers often deemphasize deliberate leadership and
instead focus on “self-organizing”aspects of ecosystems. Although uncoordinated EE
forces exist, as this study finds there is an important role played by EE leaders: individuals
and organizations engaged in active attempts to develop EEs. The study’s findings indicate
that EE leaders can help to develop ecosystems in unmunificent environments and suggest
the need for future research at the intersection of leadership, meta-organization development
and entrepreneurship.
ORCID iDs
Philip T. Roundy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4262-5274
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Corresponding author
Philip T. Roundy can be contacted at: philip-roundy@utc.edu
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