A Management Approach for the Governance of Digital Entrepreneurship Ecosystems

Digital technologies have enabled the emergence of a new breed of business ventures and introduced the concept of digital entrepreneurship as a transformative trend in the study of entrepreneurial processes and their outcomes. In particular, open innovation and collective intelligence have contributed to create a new techno-organizational system - or ecosystem - in which entrepreneurial activities are conceived and conducted. However, despite the significance of the phenomenon, the idea and archetype of Digital Entrepreneurship Ecosystem (DEE) is still largely undertheorized. In particular, there is a need to build a comprehensive definition and define the modalities required to successfully design and govern such kind of ecosystem. This article propose a conceptual breakdown of digital entrepreneurship ecosystem with the purpose to identify the founding constructs and elaborate a definition and the foundations of a management approach. A governance model is defined which includes four key dimensions (how, what, why, how) and six fundamental processes. An illustrative application of the model is finally presented to describe a case of DEE.