We are thrilled to invite you to our Professional Development Workshop (PDW): "Developing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Africa" at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2025 in Copenhagen! Why join us?
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EE) have become a dynamic and rapidly growing area of research, with multiple special issues and scholarly debates emerging across disciplines. Despite the proliferation of scholarly work and policy debate on EE, we contend that the ecosystem framework has created an implicit tendency in EE theory is inspired by IPOs in Silicon Valley, and EE empirical applications often focus on high-growth firms in Western regions, while EE policy recommendations are sometimes used to justify boosting self-employment in Africa. Meanwhile, EE policies in Africa are often co-opted into generic self-employment strategies, with limited grounding in local realities.
We believe it's time to shift the narrative.
This PDW aims to address the urgent need to harness Africa's unique demographic, natural, and cultural resources to foster productive and sustainable entrepreneurship. Despite growing global interest in EEs, the African context remains underexplored, both theoretically and empirically. This PDW seeks to advance scholarly discourse on how entrepreneurial ecosystems can enhance productive and sustainable entrepreneurship in Africa. We invite conversations that critically examine and reimagine how entrepreneurial ecosystems in Africa can be designed, adapted, and strengthened to respond to systemic challenges, support socio-economic development, and foster productive, innovation-driven entrepreneurship across the continent.
Our PDW will centre around the following key themes:
• Measuring Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Africa
• Contextualised Anchor Organisations and their role in shaping African entrepreneurial ecosystems
• Governance and Configurations of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in African contexts
Panelists & Participants
Olu Aluko, Nottingham Trent University
Paschal Anosike, University of West England
Ashenafi Biru - RMIT University
Nathaniel Boso, GIBS, University of Pretoria, & Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology,
Evelyn Derera - University of KwaZulu-Natal,
Benson Honig – McMaster University,
Sherwat Elwan Ibrahim – American University in Cairo,
Menisha Moos - University of Pretoria,
Brownhilder Ngek Neneh - University of the Free State,
Rebecca Namatovu - Copenhagen Business School,
Juliana Siwale – Nottingham Trent University,
Erik Stam, Utrecht University, Netherlands & Allan Gray Centre for Africa Entrepreneurship (AGCAE), Stellenbosch University, South
PDW Format: Panel Discussion – Scholars will discuss the relevance and importance of exploring developing entrepreneurial ecosystems in Africa.
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Olu Aluko
Assistant Professor
Olu Aluko Person
Nottingham
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