Value co-creation in entrepreneurial ecosystems: Learnings from a Norwegian perspective

Entrepreneurship has been linked with improved economic stability and the economic turnaround of countries. Creating and enabling environments that spur, cultivate and sustain entrepreneurs is of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to relate how entrepreneurial firms utilise external actors to create value in their companies in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Of particular importance is how an intermediary organisation can foster value co-creation in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. An exploratory case study was undertaken on the Oslo Cancer Cluster incubator in Norway by analysing the interaction between the firms and the incubator. The study finds that proactive intermediaries play a crucial role in the ecosystem. The prominent intermediary roles mutate according to the industry and the stage of growth of the entrepreneurial firm. Furthermore effective value co-creation is enforced in the ecosystems if the entrepreneurial firms are open to both inflows and outflows of knowledge.