Toward an Adaptive Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Theory: Explaining Ecosystem Evolution under Persistent Environmental Uncertainty
Keywords:
entrepreneurial ecosystems, ecosystem adaptive capability, persistent environmental uncertainty, dynamic capabilities, complex adaptive systemsAbstract
Persistent environmental uncertainty has fundamentally reshaped the conditions under which entrepreneurial ecosystems evolve, yet existing entrepreneurial ecosystem literature primarily explains ecosystem composition and governance rather than the adaptive mechanisms driving continuous ecosystem evolution. This article addresses this theoretical gap by developing Adaptive Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Theory, a middle-range theory that explains how entrepreneurial ecosystems continuously adapt under enduring environmental uncertainty. Using a theory-building conceptual approach, the study integrates insights from entrepreneurial ecosystem theory, dynamic capabilities, complex adaptive systems, and resilience research to construct an integrative explanatory framework. The proposed framework identifies ecosystem adaptive capability as the central ecosystem-level mechanism through which distributed sensing, resource orchestration, institutional flexibility, entrepreneurial experimentation, and recursive learning collectively transform persistent environmental uncertainty into entrepreneurial ecosystem evolution. The study extends current knowledge by relocating adaptive capability from the organizational level to the ecosystem level and by specifying the causal mechanisms that underpin adaptive ecosystem transformation. The proposed propositions and conceptual framework provide a theoretically grounded foundation for future empirical research while offering a more dynamic, process-oriented, and mechanism-based perspective for understanding entrepreneurial ecosystem evolution in increasingly uncertain environments.
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