Towards a Dynamic, Collaborative Ecosystem

Academic attention to African entrepreneurship has been biased towards social entrepreneurship and early-stage venture creation rather than commercial scaling. The academic model rewards publication in leading journals over practitioner engagement, rigour over speed, and theoretical contribution over operational application. Academics operate under institutional demands that make the continuous, iterative, co-produced knowledge ecosystems need structurally difficult to deliver.

"Academic knowledge is not shared directly with entrepreneurs which prevents learning: many academics talk to lots of small businesses. They do lots of interviews and surveys, write the paper, publish the results, and it sits in an academic journal. They never share." - interviewee

Van de Ven and Johnson's Academy of Management Review paper "Knowledge for Theory and Practice", helps explain why the academic-practice gap is not simply a failure of dissemination but a knowledge-production problem. Gibbons et al's The New Production of Knowledge distinction between Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge production then sharpens the mechanism: traditional academic research is typically discipline-led, theory-driven, and validated through peer review, while the knowledge African scaling practitioners need is more often context-driven, problem-focused, trans-disciplinary, and validated through application. In practice, this creates an institutional mismatch: academic promotion, tenure, and citation systems tend to reward Mode 1 outputs, while ecosystem practitioners need Mode 2 knowledge produced through iteration, application, and co-production.

What remains weak is sustained, nationally anchored research financing that deliberately directs funds toward commercially relevant questions, firm growth, and scaling dynamics. Africa’s aggregate R&D spending remains far below global averages, and the continent still lacks a robust, indigenous financing mechanism for intra-African research collaboration focused specifically on scaling rather than social enterprise or general innovation policy.

The African Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Index is a partnership between Utrecht University, the Allan Gray Centre for Africa Entrepreneurship at Stellenbosch University, and i4Policy. It covers 29 African countries as a continental index for ecosystem reform readiness - the substantive treatment of which sits in Data, Insights and Knowledge. The broader community of researchers working across this network - including the Interdisciplinary Network for Technology and Entrepreneurship Research in Africa (INTERA), and Systemic Innovation's collaboration with Erik Stam and the Utrecht team - represents a collective intellectual agenda advancing the field. The question is whether it can be institutionalised fast enough, and with sufficient resourcing, to produce the applied longitudinal evidence base practitioners need rather than the journal articles academic incentives reward. The Mode 2 production architecture the field requires is the institutional design challenge; the intellectual capacity to feed it already exists.

The original analysis identified fragmented collaboration as the central behavioural challenge. That diagnosis remains accurate. But the substantive treatment of role collapse - the structural mechanism by which actors that simultaneously fund, deliver, and evaluate ecosystem support generate built-in conflicts of interest - sits in Political Economy Ecosystem and Feedback Loops. The implication for collaboration analysis is direct: the competition originates not from within the ecosystem of scaling ventures, but from the support actors nominally serving it.

Role collapse cannot be solved by encouraging better collaboration. It requires structural separation of functions: investment from programme delivery, convening from competitive positioning. Competitive RFP structures force ESOs that would benefit from collaboration to compete for the same mandates, blocking the knowledge-sharing and resource-pooling that would make the field collectively stronger.

The ODA contraction creates a structural pressure that could, paradoxically, accelerate collaboration. When donor funding was abundant, there was limited incentive for ESOs and ecosystem actors to pool resources. As external capital contracts, the returns to collaboration rise: shared data infrastructure, joint programmes, and coordinated advocacy become more attractive precisely because the alternative - maintaining independent, redundant operations on shrinking budgets - becomes less viable. The Greif-Laitin quasi-parameter framing developed in Feedback Loops applies here: the slow-changing condition that sustained the dysfunctional equilibrium (donor funding abundance) is moving in a direction that makes collaboration structurally more rational than independent operation. Whether ecosystem actors respond to that pressure by collaborating, or by contracting to smaller versions of independent operation, will determine whether this section of the chapter looks different in five years' time.

A concept that has emerged from Systemic Innovation's subsequent work is worth naming explicitly: the distinction between stewardship and ownership in how ecosystem actors relate to the ventures and ecosystems they support. The dominant model in African ecosystem development has been one of ownership - funders, programmes, and institutions that treat the ventures they support as portfolio assets to be managed, the ecosystems they operate in as territories to be held, and the knowledge they generate as proprietary resources to be protected. This model produces precisely the silos, competition, and coordination failures that characterise the current landscape.

The stewardship model is different. Ecosystem actors - whether investors, accelerators, donors, or research institutions - are temporary stewards of resources and relationships, accountable to the long-term health of the ecosystem rather than to their own institutional position within it. Stewardship actors design for exit from central roles as the ecosystem matures. Ownership actors design for perpetuation. The difference in outcome, over time, is significant.

The stewardship concept connects directly to the commons-governance framework treated in Data, Insights and Knowledge and Feedback Loops. Sustainable commons require institutional actors who hold resources in trust for the broader system rather than as proprietary assets. The stewardship concept connects directly to commons-governance theory. Ostrom’s design principles for sustainable commons, and Hess and Ostrom’s extension of commons thinking to knowledge, imply governance arrangements in which actors hold resources under rules that protect collective use rather than enclosing them as proprietary assets.

This is not a call for altruism. It is a description of the institutional logic that produces durable ecosystem development. Read through the ownership/stewardship lens, the Sustain Impact framework points in the same direction: programme funding tends to reinforce institutional control, while organisational development and ecosystem strengthening move closer to stewardship because they build durable capability beyond any single grant cycle.

"If there's an honest broker - a clearing house - which provides scale tools to help entrepreneurs find the best path and appropriate solution, this might allow us to reduce duplication and waste." - interviewee

The honest-broker concept the interviewee invokes has explicit academic foundation. Roger Pielke's The Honest Broker - the foundational treatment of research-to-policy interaction - distinguishes four roles researchers and intermediary institutions can occupy: the pure scientist (producing knowledge without engaging in its application), the science arbiter (answering specific factual questions for decision-makers), the issue advocate (using research to advance specific policy outcomes), and the honest broker of policy alternatives (clarifying the choice space without prescribing a specific outcome). Pielke's central argument: the honest-broker role is the most institutionally demanding and the most consequential, because it requires sustained credibility across actors with conflicting interests - and because the institutions best positioned to occupy the role are those least conflicted in the existing system.

The African scaling ecosystem currently has no institution occupying the honest-broker role at scale. It has many issue advocates (programme implementers advancing specific approaches), several science arbiters (research firms producing commissioned analysis), and a smaller number of pure-scientist academics. The honest-broker function - independent, sustained, cross-institutional - is the gap.

Systemic Innovation has performed some of these functions through the EADC programme, the Ecosystem Provocations series, and the publication catalogue. i4Policy's ecosystem.build platform performs a related function at the policy and knowledge-diffusion level - hosting the AEEI, startup act resources, and ecosystem diagnostic tools freely accessible to practitioners across the continent. AGCAE's Pan-African Data Hub of hubs model is an attempt to build the institutional infrastructure for this function. But without a formal mandate, sustained public or philanthropic funding, and cross-institutional governance that genuinely includes governments and the private sector, these contributions remain episodic rather than systemic.

The Pielke framework names what would be required to convert episodic contribution into sustained honest-broker infrastructure. The institutional credibility required is built through explicit governance arrangements: contributor protection, transparent funding sources, cross-institutional accountability, and operational independence from any single funder or implementer. None of the existing African ecosystem-knowledge institutions has all four. The substantive treatment of what such an institution might look like sits in Recommendations and the African Scaleup Lab proposition; the implication for this chapter is that the institutional design challenge is concrete, the building blocks exist (the EADC's operational track record, the AEEI's methodological foundation, i4Policy's policy-engagement infrastructure, and a growing coalition of researchers and practitioners advancing the same intellectual agenda), and the missing element is the coalition of pioneering funders willing to commit to the institution - and the African governance architecture that would ensure it serves the ecosystem rather than its funders.

No single organisation represents the interests of scaling ventures in Africa. Collective alignment is absent at the continental level - and the cost of that absence has risen as policy environments have become more consequential for venture scaling outcomes.

The advocacy literature names what makes the difference between durable infrastructure and episodic coalitions.Sabatier's Advocacy Coalition Framework - the foundational treatment of policy advocacy as a sustained institutional activity - identifies three structural conditions for durable policy influence: shared belief systems that transcend individual issues, sustained coordination across diverse actors, and learning-oriented engagement with policy systems over time horizons of a decade or more rather than around individual policy moments.Keck and Sikkink's Activists Beyond Borders extends the analysis to transnational advocacy networks: networks that succeed at sustained policy influence are those that build dense relationships with sympathetic actors inside policy institutions, maintain consistent framings across countries and over time, and generate independent evidence that policymakers can use rather than merely demanding policy change.

The an advanced multi-stakeholder advocacy model on the continent is South Africa's SA Startup Act Movement, led bySiMODiSA and a steering committee that includes Digital Collective Africa, Endeavor South Africa, SAVCA,Silicon Cape, i4Policy, and AfricArena. The movement has spent a decade translating founder experience into policy-relevant advocacy, securing high-level public attention, and publishing annual progress reports - most recently the SA Startup Act Progress Report 2023/24 - that systematically document what has changed, what has stalled, and what structural interventions remain outstanding. The movement satisfies the Sabatier criteria - sustained coordination, shared framing, decade-long engagement, learning orientation - that distinguish durable advocacy infrastructure from episodic coalitions. It demonstrates what is possible when ecosystem actors build an evidence-based, institutionally sustained advocacy infrastructure rather than ad hoc coalitions around individual policy moments.

The African Union Startup Model Law Framework, launched in July 2024 with Google and Africa Practice, provides principles, recommendations, and sample legislative clauses to guide all 55 AU member states. It represents the first continent-wide template for startup legislation. Its adoption rate and implementation quality across member states will be the measure of its impact. i4Policy - whose participatory approach has contributed to Rwanda's Startup Act drafting and advocacy across Ghana, Cape Verde, and the DRC - is the most active practitioner of the co-creative policy design methodology the framework requires. The mission-oriented innovation framework treated in Innovation Infrastructure operates at the state-coordination layer the model law would catalyse.

The Pan-African Policy Taskforce, co-led by i4Policy, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Smart Africa, and AGCAE, provides a peer-to-peer learning platform spanning multiple African countries. It is the most comprehensive attempt to build the durable, cross-government policy engagement infrastructure that effective startup advocacy requires - moving beyond episodic convenings toward institutionalised learning and reform coordination. The Keck-Sikkink framework names what makes this kind of infrastructure consequential: dense relationships across government institutions, consistent framings across countries, independent evidence that policymakers can use. The taskforce architecture is designed to produce all three.

The infrastructure for effective collective voice is being assembled - country by country (SA Startup Act), continental (AU framework), and across governments (Pan-African Policy Taskforce). The outstanding challenge is connecting these mechanisms to the interests of scaling ventures specifically, not startups generically. A Startup Act that reduces friction for company registration is valuable. What scaling ventures need - governance frameworks for boards, FX access for international expansion, tax treatment of employee equity, domestic capital availability at Series B and beyond - requires a more specialised advocacy infrastructure than any of these initiatives currently provides. The substantive operational treatment of these scaling-specific binding constraints sits in From Structure to Operations and The Scaling Decision Log; the implication for ecosystem advocacy is that the infrastructure now being built at the startup-policy layer needs to be extended to the scaling-policy layer - and that the institution that could lead this extension does not yet exist at the continental scale.