Fostering private entrepreneurial support organizations involvement in the development of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems. Evidence from the emerging FinTech industry.

The importance of the role of private Entrepreneurial Support Organizations in the development of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems is well recognized by literature. Surprisingly, no research addressed how governments should promote the emergence of such organizations. In fact, the effective presence of private Entrepreneurial Support Organizations in a region is often taken for granted, even though it is known that most ecosystems are incomplete. Adopting the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem framework, this paper aims to fill this knowledge gap by investigating on which enabling factors the government can intervene to foster the development of such organizations, and how much such factors are capable to influence the overall availability of private Entrepreneurial Support Organizations. By focusing on the European FinTech industry, we investigated these research questions by applying first a Qualitative Comparative Analysis and then Poisson fixed effect regressions on a built-on-purpose panel dataset of programs provided by private Entrepreneurial Support Organizations. Findings suggest that specific combinations of enabling factors were consistently capable to enable the presence of private programs and that intervening on specific factors with targeted policies might positively impact the overall availability of private programs, giving interesting insights to policymakers who want to promote the emergence of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in their regions.