Fabien Nadou (p)

Marcus Dejardin

The systems and structures for supporting and developing entrepreneurship have enjoyed a strong growth over the past twenty years in all French territories. This important deployment is based on strategies, relationships and behaviors between public and private actors, in a reach an entrepreneurial ecosystem of resources, value creation and attractiveness. This relationship and coordination dynamic within the system requires anchor points and intermediation processes between actors to make the ecosystem operational and sustainable. Incubators, particularly student incubators, carry potential in setting up these intermediation processes that favor the creation of new spaces and territories for entrepreneurial support. We propose here to put the notion of territorial intermediation in an exploratory perspective, resting the question of the conceptual links between territories and entrepreneurship, but also on the empirical level, by the observation of the "InsIde" incubator in Normandy, which has developed initiatives to make the support model for young creators more efficient and innovative. The case study is about a business school incubator, which try to develop a territorial ecosystem to promote the creation economic activities by students.
The issues related to entrepreneurial support require the integration of explanatory models that take into account the spatial and territorial dimensions (Bacha et al., 2016) as their role becomes a key factor in the implementation and sustainability of the ecosystem.
The conceptual question that we ask is that of the organization of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, which still lacks theorization (Acs et al., 2014, Stam, 2015), in relation to the territory. Do the processes of territorial intermediation, which correspond to relational dynamics and behaviors between actors inscribed on a territory (Lacour, 1996, Nadou, 2013), can they contribute to better understanding the functioning of entrepreneurial ecosystems? On the empirical level, our objective is to examine, the role of incubators, in particular students, in the development of entrepreneurship and to see if these they allow the definition and the formalization of new spaces and territories of entrepreneurial accompaniment (Bories-Azeau et al., 2018). To what extent do certain schemes developed by incubators enable the emergence of new relationships between territorial actors and form part of a process of territorial intermediation favoring the establishment of entrepreneurial ecosystems geared towards students?
Data on the ability to organize new entrepreneurship support spaces, to federate competing, complementary, but sometimes unreadable devices for young creators come from both semi-structured interviews with responsible for the incubator and support program, specifically observed and analyzed.

Nathalie Gaussier (p), Claude Lacour (p)

Marcus Dejardin

This paper highlights the main theoretical issues to understand the operation of start-ups in metropolitan ecosystem(s). It is a question of discussing the strong ideas in the form of contextual research hypotheses likely to carry a renewed theoretical framework. The method is based on the analysis of the literature, the theoretical frameworks and the modalities of their renewal. It is also nourished by a monographic approach and preliminary investigations. The paper discusses and highlights seven fundamental hypotheses that are illustrated in particular from the study of the Bordeaux metropolis.

We discuss hypothesis 1 of a theoretical renewal of entrepreneurship and start-ups, both a shift and a theoretical mirage carried by the term ecosystem. Hypothesis 2 makes it possible to return to the characteristic traits of the entrepreneur, made of symbols found again: single-handed but also united with his ecosystem. Hypothesis 3 questions the renewed practice of the technological and digital economy, which finds in the ecosystem the means of describing different scales and worlds. Hypothesis 4 questions the role of actors and public policies, important operators in the construction of start-ups ecosystems that do not have the same representation of the ecosystem as the start-ups themselves. Hypothesis 5 returns to the dominant territorial model, the symbols of the success and fragility of start-ups. The role of the ecosystem in its multi-scalar dimension is considered in hypothesis 6. Finally, the last hypothesis emphasizes the role of externalities necessary for the development of start-up ecosystems, both urban and metropolitan. Our attention to entrepreneurship and start-ups leads to a research protocol that questions more widely the representations and readings that can be envisaged for regional science, territorial and urban development.

Josep-Maria Arauzo-Carod (p)

Marcus Dejardin

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