Mapping Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for Technology Start-ups in Developing Economies: An Empirical Analysis of Twitter Networks Between Start-ups and Support Organizations of Nairobi’s Digital Economy

The literature on entrepreneurial ecosystem places emphasis on understanding the surrounding business environment for entrepreneurial activities of individual actors in a system, typically at the city or regional level. While gaining prominence as a useful concept to provide guidance for innovation and entrepreneurship policy, the framework at its current stage faces conceptual as well as empirical challenges with regards to the structural boundary of the ecosystem and measurement. This chapter aims to jointly address these issues by deploying a novel combination of methods and data sources to map the interaction within a dynamic emerging ecosystem in Nairobi, Kenya. We do so by identifying start-ups and investors utilising data from CrunchBase and exploring the dynamics of the relevant actors in the Twitter network, where we use manual categorisation as well as data-driven community detection algorithms to identify social networks in the ecosystem. We identify distinct communities in the ecosystem based on the technological focus, the types of support organisations, and interaction patterns in the network. We show how technology start-ups in developing economies are connected to support organisations of various geographical origins, which implies that ecosystems for supporting entrepreneurship can emerge across borders.