knowledge, networks, worker talent, VC, BA, bootstrapping, leadership, professionals and intermediaries) that are critical to the validation stage of BG start-up development.
Nevertheless, even though these elements might be critical, their influence is largely de-pendent on their presence in the system. Therefore, the findings revealed that five ele-ments (i.e. engagement events, professionals, intermediaries, leadership and bootstrap-ping) performed relatively well and, thus, could be considered strengths of the case ex-ample, whereas three (i.e. BA, knowledge and networks) were in between and four ele-ments (i.e. informal capital, VC, entrepreneurial talent and worker talent) represented weaknesses of the system. The rest of the elements (i.e. networking services, crowdfund-ing and CVC) were less central for BG start-ups, and one element (i.e. formal debt) was even considered irrelevant.
Furthermore, the main contribution of this study was to initiate discussion on the EE as a systemic construct and its direct involvement in firm development on the way to devel-oping an international presence (Kshetri, 2014; Acs et al., 2016). In this case, I aligned two research fields in a way never previously attempted and in the transitional country context of Estonia. Another novel aspect was mapping out the elements of the literature review, which included some newer concepts (i.e. crowdfunding, engagement events), and then ranking these based on the perceptions of BG start-up founders in terms of the criticality of each element for the respective development stage of their business. In ad-dition, by assessing each element’s presence in the system, I managed to illustrate its main strengths and weaknesses while acknowledging that some elements were less central.
Therefore, this practical guideline for founders delivers the first overview of bordering ecosystems and what matters in the local context.
4.2.3 Role in the dissertation
The second empirical article served the purpose of detecting and connecting the ecosys-tem concept and its structural composition with the BG type of start-up development. It was necessary to expand the systemic configuration to reflect what is critical for the dis-covery and validation stages of such firms in an example country context. In addition, I evaluated criticality aspects of the elements for firm development and their subjective performance for start-up founders. Finally, I prepared the groundwork to further extend the empirical investigation into a two-country context to substantiate my initial findings and introduced and connected the EE phenomenon specifically to IE research field to deal with its dispersion and ambiguity (Paul and Rosado-Serrano, 2019).
4.3
Publication III4.3.1 Objective
The objective of the third empirical study was to investigate how the EE influences BG start-up development by juxtaposing the results for two unique countries in close
prox-imity. Comparative studies on BGs have been called for to advance the IE literature (Ter-jesen, Hessels and Li, 2016). In response, I compared Finland and Estonia by delving into their ecosystem constructs to detect structural commonalities considered critical for the preliminary advancement of new ventures. I wanted to verify the findings of previous studies and discover if founding entrepreneurs’ benefit from the same systemic elements when launching and growing their new ventures. Additionally, I measured the perfor-mance of these two neighbouring ecosystems and comparatively assessed their strong and weak points.
4.3.2 Findings and Contributions
The main finding was that the most critical elements tend to be the same, even though I compared two different country-level EEs. Hence, I can assert that BG start-up founders perceive the same systemic conditions relevant to preliminary development with varia-tions in their criticality ranking. After adjusting the cut-off points, I determined that Finn-ish and Estonian BG start-ups perceived nine common systemic elements (i.e. entrepre-neurial talent, knowledge, leadership, informal capital, networks, bootstrapping, worker talent, engagement events and BAs) in the introduction stage and seven such elements (i.e. entrepreneurial talent, knowledge, leadership, networks, worker talent, BAs and VC) in the validation stage. However, in the latter stage, Finnish ventures deemed ‘profession-als’ to be critical, whereas their Estonian counterparts believed ‘bootstrapping’ practice to be. In addition, I divided these critical elements in terms of their strengths and weak-nesses. The Finnish ecosystem exhibited five elements as their strengths (i.e. networks, engagement events, knowledge, BAs and professionals), two potential strongpoints (i.e.
entrepreneurial talent and worker talent) and four weaknesses (i.e. VC, informal capital, leadership and bootstrapping). For their part, Estonians exhibited three strengths (i.e. net-works, engagement events and leadership), three potential strongpoints (i.e. knowledge, BAs and bootstrapping) and four weaknesses (i.e. VC, informal capital, entrepreneurial talent and worker talent). Although all elements are relevant to stage-wise progress, some might be less essential (i.e. formal debt for Estonians). Also, I discovered that the Finnish EE performed better in terms of these critical elements than the Estonian one did (Acs, Autio and Szerb, 2014).
Moreover, the main contribution of this study was to verify the configuration similarities between variations of the ecosystem construct in their influence on the BG start-up pro-cess. I discovered that there is indeed a common set of elements which firms perceive as critical in the preliminary stages, even if there exist considerable differences in terms of stage-wise and country-wise rankings and performance. Such a common orientation sug-gests that EEs are unique in their configuration and abundance, whilst their underlying structural composition remains rather similar. In addition, this research has made an im-portant contribution by reflecting a layout which founders can employ to improve their own entrepreneurial journey and that policymakers can use to introduce better legislation to support entrepreneurs, and through their mutual interaction, they can create well-per-forming local EEs.
4.3 Publication III 65
Table 5. Synopsis of dissertation publications
4.3.3 Role in the dissertation
The empirical work presented seeks to consolidate understanding of the systemic config-uration. I compared the criticality rankings, the presence of ecosystem elements and their performance in preliminary stages and in a two-country context. This led me to validate the results of the second empirical inquiry. In addition, due to the critical similarities of the ecosystems and the alignment of strengths to weaknesses, and vice versa, I was able to further develop a conceptual view of ecosystem integration for the following fourth empirical study.