Model for evaluation of less-matured digital business ecosystems

• Autor(a) principal: Duarte, David João Queimado Vaz Ponte
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/42447
• topic: Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial Ecosystems; Digital Business; Startups; Composite Index; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Mecânica

The entrepreneurship philosophy assimilated shaped perfectly to the new reality provided by the emergence of the new technologies of information and communication, connecting people and organizations and narrowing the distance between them. With this distance shortage, entrepreneurship assumed a more local dimension than ever, promoting the emergence of smaller entrepreneurial ecosystems at a city-level, ceasing to be exclusive to big cities: the digital business ecosystems. These smaller communities are, therefore, unique and, due to the intrinsic factors of its location (society, culture, finance, politics, demography, etc.), validate the premise of placing the city as the center of the study of entrepreneurship. Recently, academical studies have been using this approach to analyze the entrepreneurial activity in cities, with the help of composite indexes which provide numerical comparisons between the cities. However, these studies tend to be focused on matured digital business ecosystems. As such, this dissertation is motivated by such lack of knowledge and analysis of less-matured digital business ecosystems. The aim of this study is to develop a model of comparison of less-matured digital business ecosystem to be applied in the southern and eastern European region and, with its results, analyze the patterns of such region. This dissertation is settled on a solid literature review followed by a study of the region selected to validate the conditions previously established. With this knowledge base, the model is developed following a strategy fitted with the characteristics of less-matured entrepreneurial ecosystems (configuration, themes, variables, weights, data processing and display). The final results are analyzed and used a base to conjecture about the region’s entrepreneurial activity. With this study, it was concluded that the strategy defined cannot be the same as the other more general models, and is crucial to attaining reliable results through this model with these particularities. Concerning with the final results, it was concluded that this region has potential to evolve its stage of entrepreneurial maturity, however, it currently lacks entrepreneurial culture and experience to fully enable input conditions to generate outputs aspired.