The triple-helix model as foundation of innovative entrepreneurial ecosystems
Authors: Schebesch Klaus Bruno , ȘSoim Horațiu Florin , Blaga Radu Lucian 
Published: November 2024

Purpose

Recommend ways to increase the entrepreneurial performance score for city-centered entrepreneurial ecosystems (EES) and the possible role within the triplex helix concept. The former applies to lower-ranked EESs. For the latter, the authors hypothesize that the standard triple helix model of counting on some existing, well known multi-party interest in bringing together businesses and other stakeholders (especially universities and government) is insufficient. Including more players and alternative cooperation models may truly enable a long lasting productive interplay of cooperative and competitive forces leading to genuinely innovative (non-marginal, non-opportunistic) businesses and also to more regional well-being. This study aims at leveraging the city-based view on entrepreneurial ecosystems, to enable new ways of boosting the functionality of triple-helix minded programs, especially so for emerging economies and their cross-border regions.

Design/methodology/approach

Methodology is dual: (1) paying tribute to the history of entrepreneurial behavior and reviewing the diverse sources of support (institutional and otherwise), eventually leading to today’s concentrations of successful innovative business, and (2) analyzing modern data on performance of city-centered EESs. Putting emphasis on path-dependence (meaning that history matters) the authors analyze data distributions of measures concerning city-centered EESs and also nation-wide entrepreneurial aggregates, searching signs of long-tail statistic, an indicator of path dependence. Furthermore the authors statistically analyze if and to what extend, key university performance indices translate into successful EESs. From these results, recommendation follow.

Findings

Historical developments and cultural backgrounds of different countries lead to different ways of support for new ideas and approaches. Entrepreneurship success is path-dependent and there are entrepreneurial approaches more easy – but others way more difficult – to imitate (e.g. “Hidden Champions”). Statistical analysis of entrepreneurial performance data confirms power law decay, which confirms the action of path-depend processes. Statistical models show that university performance is just weakly influencing entrepreneurial success. This leads to proposing a new, polycentric approach for organizing robust cooperation between the stakeholders, potentially capable of lifting low-score EESs into a more productive regime.

Research limitations/implications

Research limitation primarily concern data availability, as potentially useful information is not publicly available. The findings lead to further questions, and to questioning too optimistic expectations about cooperation readiness of the implied triple helix stakeholders. As pointed out repeatedly, other important players are non-university research organizations with more focused goals (national labs, etc.), which should be explicitly accounted for. Another directions is distinguishing between support for (a) short-term high-tech, and for (b) longer term, deep-tech entrepreneurs. The latter may require new evaluation techniques and specially tailored private-public partnerships. Finally, polycentric and polycentric cross-border cooperation requires more research into networked organizations.

Practical implications

Triple-helix based, cooperative agreements should rethink the effective functionality of EESs. City-centered, EESs tend to be most expressive in their projects but also subject to a stronger long tail-effect. This implies “success-breads-success” for the front-runners, enjoying very low ranking mobility. Lower-positioned EESs may profit from the mobility within this score region. However, the still lower positioned ones face strong downward rank mobility, implying that special effort (support) is needed. The authors’ proposal of polycentric cooperation, especially the cross-border variant, would credibly enable such support by bringing in both, more players and more levels of play, helping robust networking.

Social implications

This research has potentially profound social implications. Acknowledging the path-dependence of intellectual capital formation and emergence of entrepreneurial spirit in the modern sense helps to understand which techno-entrepreneurial endeavors would have increased chance of success of being brought up in the respective EES. It is also useful to identify the oversold (over-hyped) entrepreneurial projects. Concerning the cross-border polycentric organizations harboring EESs one may have to concede that national borders are sub-optimal, at least with regard to lifting up the entrepreneurial reputation of border-adjacent regions. Implicitly, opportunistic and marginal entrepreneurship (e.g. in Eastern Europe) would reduce.

Originality/value

This research claims originality for combining a qualitative-historical approach with a statistical modeling approach, which can explain the dynamic nature of the involved entrepreneurial processes (long-tails). While the historical approach is deemed to be necessary for understanding the reasons for the large differences in entrepreneurial success across nations and regions, the statistical modeling is helping to identify lower-score intervals within the entrepreneurial score hierarchy which are more easy, or, alternatively, very hard to escape. This in turn leads to adapted recommendations and mobilizing special efforts for creating new, potentially robust, cooperative arrangements beyond the triple-helix concept.