ENGLISH SUMMARY: Innovation hubs have emerged as key hybrid entrepreneurship spaces where certain important institutional arrangements are made. Yet their development impact has arguably remained elusive. To explore underlying issues, this research aimed to answer the main question: How can hubs across Africa be reconfigured in ways that translate entrepreneurship into development?
This investigation took an institutional approach to answering the research question. This was grounded on the argument that while evolutionary economic theory was an important contribution in crystallising the role of entrepreneurship in the formal economy, it reduced entrepreneurship to a micro-economic phenomenon by overly focusing on the individual entrepreneur and understating the mediating factors of institutional arrangements and the political economy.
By implication, this necessitated a redescription of entrepreneurship in line with a macro-economic development perspective. Drawing from the new conceptual redescription of entrepreneurship and literature reviewed, it was argued that hubs have the potential to be effective at supporting entrepreneurship that leads to development, but only if they employ an ecological approach. An ecological approach was argued to be more useful for African entrepreneurship because it meant acknowledging the importance of creating a dynamic ecology of support among hubs. The choice of methodology was, by extension, based on its ability to embrace the relational and macro-economic perspectives of entrepreneurship. Thus, the study used an emergent transformative transdisciplinary research methodology involving five research design phases: co-design, stakeholder engagements, co-production of new knowledge, dissemination of results; and inspiring action. To complement the methodology, the study followed a narrative-based research method called SenseMaker®, which enabled the data collection of 100 stories across Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda. To answer the research question, the investigation organised respondent data into factual knowledge of their current realities (systems knowledge), areas of possible levers that may signal strategic areas of intervening (transformation knowledge) and ideal results local respondents reported they want (target knowledge). The analysis execution of the qualitative dataset used to derive empirical findings, employed two but complementary statistical techniques namely thematic analysis and non-linear causality diagram.
One of the key empirical findings suggested hubs are potentially a key institutional vehicle that assembles resources such as talent, ideas and capital. Concurrently, the study highlighted an ongoing dominant perspective that while government is experienced as either absent or punitive, and private sector continues to be experienced as the lead force in coordinating ecosystem activities that drive entrepreneurship momentum and maturity; successful African entrepreneurs are essentially minority foreigners or diaspora with international education, past corporate experiences or upper-middle-class family backgrounds.
By providing a new theoretical redescription of entrepreneurship from a development perspective and a practical example of employing methodological agility in an empirical investigation, the study contributed an original narrative account of stakeholder’s experiences evidencing the growing emerging view that even though the mainstream discourse in entrepreneurship is mainly about driving momentum and maturity across different ecosystems, locals and indigenous entrepreneurs do not have a sense of control or human agency to shape the directionality of African entrepreneurship toward development outcomes they want.
