Erica Siqueira, Bruno Fischer, Adriana Bin and Jill Kickul 

Pathways to sustainable development are key to providing innovation transitions and well-being. In this context, knowledge-intensive entrepreneurs play a pivotal role in shaping the markets for new products, services, and business models.

In this article, we propose the comprehensive notion of Knowledge-Intensive Social Entrepreneurship (KISE), a derived concept from Knowledge Intensive Entrepreneurship (KIE), which are new ventures inserted in entrepreneurial ecosystems that draw their capabilities from a solid knowledge base while creating socio-environmental value. Hence, we shed light on entrepreneurial ecosystems studies by identifying the causal mechanisms between ecosystem features and KISE events in a developing country context describing in which cities social enterprises have more or less support to grow and develop. To do this, we use empirical data from firms participating in the PIPE Program (Innovative Research in Small Business) funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) – a Brazilian agency.

Our sample consists of 564 PIPE projects granted between 2006-2018 and the methodological approach relies on the estimation of entrepreneurial propensity functions that assess the statistical associations between city-level socioeconomic features and the generation of KISE for a panel of 629 municipalities. Findings indicate strong similarities on the underlying ecosystem drivers of traditional and KISE ventures. Such conditions suggest that the essential contextual features sustaining entrepreneurial ecosystems can be adapted to foster the emergence of new firms that address social and environmental challenges. As it turns out, the transition towards more sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems can benefit from already existing conditions that nurture other forms of entrepreneurial activity.

From this analysis, a substantial overlap emerges between the configurations of traditional entrepreneurial ecosystems and KISE. Considering the similarities, there seems to be room for initiatives that look for both knowledge-intensive and social orientation in their entrepreneurial activities, aligning social and environmental positive impact with innovation towards economic development. However, the results also allow us to observe the lack of alignment of current technological capabilities and the appearance of these firms, a situation that likely represents the lack of maturity of such ecosystems when it comes to promoting sustainable transitions. Although entrepreneurship is based on bottom-up activities, we are facing, as a society, an unprecedented historical moment that requires orchestrated transition processes to impact-oriented entrepreneurship. By this, we do not mean that it is necessary to rebuild the logic of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Rather, a reorientation towards the inclusion of KISE firms in the agents' agenda can offer a guide for the allocation of resources that facilitate the process of transition to a more inclusive and sustainable economy.