Early stage entrepreneurs, support organizations, and ecosystems

ERIs broad research focus on ‘Early stage entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial support organizations, and ecosystems’ is timely and relevant to current academic discourse and public policy formulation. There are more than 10,000 BIAs globally. Toronto Metropolitan University is an acknowledged leader in the creation of a robust network of innovation zones, including DMZ, which is ranked as the top university business incubator in the world. Within the academic literature, the large but disparate body of research on entrepreneurial support organizations is becoming mainstream with efforts to integrate and refine the domain, key constructs and empirical approaches. On a practical level, BIAs represent an important public policy instrument aimed at stimulating economic development and growth. For example, the strengthening of Canada's network of business accelerators and incubators (BAIs) across the country is a key element of the Innovation and Skills Plan. Moreover, there is increasing recognition that the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystems and their constituent elements (such as universities and entrepreneurship education programs, BIAs, venture capital firms, angel investors, etc.) vary widely on both the regional and national levels, and individual entrepreneurs differ in their ability to access and benefit from various forms of support. Taken together, these stylized facts confirm the importance of undertaking research that contributes to our understanding of the phenomenon of business incubation and entrepreneurial support, and the contextual factors that affect success.