Regional entrepreneurial ecosystems: how family firm embeddedness triggers ecosystem development

Regional business development is driven by family firms, which are generally deeply embedded in their region, particularly in rural areas. This study explores how family entrepreneurs’ embeddedness drives an entrepreneurial ecosystem as a regional context for innovation. For this purpose, the study brings together entrepreneurship research on embeddedness and on ecosystems, and develops the entrepreneurial ecosystem embeddedness framework to better understand the connection of entrepreneurs to their local environment along three dimensions. Analyzing qualitative interviews from the hospitality context with a pattern matching approach, we highlight the role of family entrepreneurs’ (1) horizontal embeddedness in the economic and socio-political environment, their (2) vertical embeddedness in industry regimes, in particular the family, and their (3) spatial embeddedness in the region for value creation. Thereby we contribute to a differentiated understanding of how embeddedness as a social fabric relates to entrepreneurial ecosystems. The propositions of this study recommend raising awareness for managing entrepreneurs’ embeddedness along these three dimensions since unilateral engagement and a lack of coordinated embeddedness can restrict value creation.