On 21 and 22 July 2025, the Nova Business School in Carcavelos, Lisbon, hosted the “Open and User Innovation Conference 2025”, organised by the Open and User Innovation Society and dedicated to the themes of entrepreneurship, innovation, and ecosystems.
An article entitled ‘Embeddedness of entrepreneurial ecosystems: mapping and contrasting university-industry and university-based social relations’ was presented by Dina Pereira, coordinator of the European consortium IMPACTWHEEL, co-authored with João Leitão and Anmari Viljamaa.
The article focuses on the concept of embeddedness and how social interactions are part of economic action and how this integration influences entrepreneurial activity. The work was developed from the mapping of six European ecosystems within the ECOACTION project, funded by the HEI Initiative, which served as the basis for the new initiative also supported by the HEI Initiative, IMPACTWHEEL. The study uses a multiple case study approach developed in Finland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Spain and Portugal as part of the HEI EcoAction initiative, and mapped the main components of this type of ecosystem, contrasting different contexts of university-industry ecosystems and university-based ecosystems, taking into account the scarcity of studies addressing the role played by key actors in entrepreneurial ecosystems. The evidence obtained from the collection of cases provides a new conceptual framework that can be used in the design of a new generation of smart specialisation strategies and lays the foundations for the creation of instruments to support entrepreneurial ecosystems that will be the target of intervention in the IMPACTWHEEL initiative.
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