Within the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem: Is Innovation Clusters’ Strategic Approach Boosting Businesses’ Sustainable Development?

Oana Bărbulescu, Cristina Nicolau and Daniel Munteanu
Additional contact information
Oana Bărbulescu: Faculty of Economic Sciences and Business Administration, Transilvania University of Brașov, 500036 Brașov, Romania
Cristina Nicolau: Faculty of Economic Sciences and Business Administration, Transilvania University of Brașov, 500036 Brașov, Romania
Daniel Munteanu: Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, Transilvania University of Brașov, 500036 Brașov, Romania

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 21, 1-21

Abstract: The article focuses on the creation and the development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem around the innovation clusters. Clusters are believed to have a well-defined strategic approach aimed at boosting businesses’ sustainable development, especially if clusters are centred around small and middle-sized enterprises. Having undertaken a piece of phenomenological qualitative research, we found that large companies were more open to cooperation and sustainability than the small and middle-sized ones, thus initiating and developing innovation clusters around them (particularly in high-technologized industries such as the automotive and Information Technology). Additionally, we highlight that a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem is based on strong pillars, of which small companies’ capabilities, including the entrepreneurial ones, are innovation-driven, and place them in the centre of the innovation cluster. This piece of research also provides relevant insights for private and public organisations and policymakers in order to co-create a local innovation and entrepreneurship strategy. Our findings have implications for both cluster literature and the field of entrepreneurship.

Keywords: sustainable development; entrepreneurship ecosystem; innovation; cluster; business strategy; SMEs; qualitative research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/21/11762/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/21/11762/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:21:p:11762-:d:663917

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().