An evaluation of the effectiveness of innovation ecosystems in facilitating the adoption of sustainable entrepreneurship

Abstract

Sustainable entrepreneurship has a substantial role of a steadily growing economy and advanced industrial economies. Several strategies have been formed and employed to support the adoption of innovation and technologies in the sustainable entrepreneurship sector. However, the successful outcome of these strategies in achieving their goals depends on how effective they are in satisfying their objectives and thus increasing innovation adoption. One measurement for effectiveness of ecosystem implements can be their support to the input of the process of innovation and technologies adoption and their impact on satisfying regional goals. The objective of this research is evaluating the effectiveness of innovation ecosystem instruments on increasing the adoption of innovation in sustainable entrepreneurship by developing a comprehensive assessment decision model. Strategy targets used in this assessment depend on five perspectives that are perceived by decision makers as important for the adoption process. The decision model linked the perspectives to ecosystem targets and various innovation ecosystem instruments. These perspectives are economic, environmental, social, technical, and ethical. The research implemented the hierarchical decision model (HDM) to construct a generalized ecosystem assessment framework. The HDM model has the ability to be generalizable and can utilize in different regions. Also, in this research, the desirability curves methodology is implemented. This methodology will help the researcher in the future to consider any additional alternatives. As it is mentioned before, Desirability Curve describes how desirable a certain assessment variable is for the decision-maker according to expert judgments.

Finally, two case studies were conducted to demonstrate the practicality of this assessment model. The model pointed to the weakness and strengths of Saudi Arabia’s and China’s Innovation Ecosystem in facilitating the adoption of sustainable entrepreneurship along with providing recommendations for areas of improvement based on desirability curves.