How Does the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Contribute to the Performance of Entrepreneurial Start-Up Firms?

The entrepreneurship ecosystem is a fundamental approach for policy makers to improve the performance of start-ups. The main focus of this paper is on how the entrepreneurship ecosystem contributes to the performance of start-ups and how the entrepreneurship ecosystem can be evaluated. Using Bayesian Best-Worst Method, we examine the importance of different entrepreneurship ecosystem attributes on entrepreneurial success (contains four measurements: profitability, sales growth, employment growth, and market share) in the Netherlands in the agri-food industry. Our findings highlight that, of the attributes, Talent has a significant importance for profitability, sales growth and employment growth. In other words, our results show the impact of Talent on effectiveness of ecosystem. Moreover, evaluating the current performance of entrepreneurship ecosystem and using Importance-Performance analysis showed that the Dutch agri-food entrepreneurship ecosystem is very successful and effective.