I've got a new paper out in Small Business Economics. "[Learning to Grow in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-026-01252-1)" is a chonker, clocking in at 23,000 words. But it's worth it! This paper has been brewing for a long time. Depending on how you measure it, I worked on this paper longer than it took me to get a PhD. And in those many years, I've been obsessed with one question: how do entrepreneurial ecosystems actually work? In some way that's a pretty strange question. We know what a good ecosystem needs: money, smart people, a supportive culture, maybe toss in a research university in there for good measure. But a how isn't a way! There are plenty of places with all of these things that don't have a lot of high-growth entrepreneurship, and plenty of places without this stuff that do. So we've actually got to start looking at what entrepreneurs do in their ecosystem. After all, all that good stuff isn't just floating around in the æther, they need to actually go out an get it. After talking with dozens of high-growth founders in Scotland, I hit on an initial insight: a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs I talked to learnt how to grow by talking to other people in their ecosystem. Growing an entrepreneurial firm is really hard and it takes a lot of skills that are totally different from the ones you need to start a company. A lot of growth isn't about wild innovation, it's about managing sales processes, hiring people, firing people, and figuring out the VAT gets paid even when you're on vacation. But the bigger insight I got from my interviews was that, essentially, there are no *new* problems in growth. Every problem that an entrepreneur encounters has happened a thousand times before, meaning that there are a thousand different solutions. Now, exact details of the problems may differ based on a founder's unique context, but most problems a founder encounters as they grow are actually pretty generic. And that's where the ecosystem comes in. An entrepreneur who engages in their ecosystem by talking to other founders is well-equipped to deal with problems before they encounter it. They've developed *heuristics* that allow them to anticipate problems and come up with solutions quickly when they happen. π But here's the thing, not all learning is created equally. Some ways of learning are better for learning how to grow an entrepreneurial firm than others. Drawing on the vast, vast literature, I did what every good academic should do: I made a 2x2 figure of how founders learn. This is based on the interactivity of the learning (is it done with other people or is by themselves), and how contextual the learning is (is it generic business knowledge or is it specific to their industry, their goals, and their stage of development) ![[Pasted image 20260701112650.png]] Now, up in the place of honor in the top right is the highly interactive and highly contextual 'co-active vicarious learning.' This sounds fancy, but it's basically just πstorytelling. Founders love telling stories about the problems they've faced (even if listening to them is a bit harder). As they tell these stories to each other, everyone is learning. The storyteller gets to revisit the problem and their solution and reflect on what worked and what didn't. The listener doesn't just get the solution, they get the context that they solution was developed in, which makes it easier to adjust that solution to meet their own needs. So, co-active vicarious learning is great. But, it's time consuming and takes a great deal of trust between people to really share problems. This isn't something you get just by sticking around for snacks after an event. And that's where things get interesting. I did interviews in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. These cities are about a 40-minute train ride apart (well, when ScotRail is on time), but as anyone will tell you, they have vastly different local cultures and economic histories. Edinburgh [has emerged as one of the strongest entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe](https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijirde/v7y2016i2p141-160.html). Glasgow, despite being the larger city, has had less success in entrepreneurship. But, because both cities are in Scotland, their entrepreneurial support structure is managed by Scottish Enterprise rather than the local authorities, meaning that they have the same types of startup support. But, after I used the interviews I did with founders in both cities to identify how they learned about growth, I saw a stark difference between the two cities. ![[Pasted image 20260701120818.png]] Founders in Edinburgh were far more likely to engage in co-active vicarious learning while Glaswegian founders largely depended on experiential learning, where they learnt by doing and reflecting on what they did. Why did this happen? As always, it's all about the culture. Both cities have had entrepreneurial success stories, but the founders of successful firms in Edinburgh have remained engaged in the ecosystem, helping other founders and normalizing the types of repeated interactions that enable co-active vicarious learning. In Glasgow, the big successful entrepreneurs have tended to leave the city (one after making a big donation that helped fund the [Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship](https://www.strath.ac.uk/business/huntercentreforentrepreneurship/) at Strathclyde, so it's not like they're shirkers). This means that there's not the same cultural normalization of the intensive learning and trusting that co-active vicarious learning requires, making it harder to achieve. This was most obvious when I asked founders who they got advice from. Those in Edinburgh really loved talking to everyone. Didn't matter if they founders were more advanced or in a different sector. Most of the founders I talked to reported striking up conversations with anyone they could. But founders in Glasgow were more selective. Some only wanted to talk to founders in the same industry, since there's more they could learn. Others *didn't* want to talk to founders in the same sector since they thought they might give away some competitive advantage. Promiscuous networking was normalized in Edinburgh but not in Glasgow. Culture affects more than the willingness to learn, it also affects how easy it is to do that learning. Because of its successes *and* the effort founders have invested in their community, Edinburgh has more events and more gatherings of founders. It's easier to find other founders who are at a similar or more advanced stages, so there's a lot of knowledge easily flowing the ecosystem that entrepreneurs can access. This is not the case in Glasgow — or at least wasn't when I conducted the interviews in *sigh* 2017. Academic publishing takes a long time. Even for founders who really wanted to learn from other founders, there just wasn't many local opportunities for them. This makes for a nice way to explain how learning develops in an ecosystem. An underlying cultural orientation helps normalize certain networking and learning practices and affects the structure of the ecosystem that creates learning opportunities. All of this contributes to how founders learn, which helps them build heuristics. If they build good heuristics, they'll be more successful, meaning other founders copy these heuristics (especially if they share them through storytelling), which eventually shifts the culture of the ecosystem. ![[Pasted image 20260701124206.png]] Now, why does all of this matter? Well, I think that co-active learning leads to better businesses. Indeed, this research took so long that I actually got very good performance statistics, just by waiting for years and years. Founders who used co-active learning grew faster and survived longer than those that didn't. Now, this is qualitative work so I can't say that this is causation and not correlation, but I do think it is [waggling its eyebrows suggestively](https://xkcd.com/552/) ![[Pasted image 20260701124523.png]] So, what's the take away from all of this? I think it's that **entrepreneurs learn about entrepreneurship from other entrepreneurs.** Kind of sucks for me as an entrepreneurial educator, but that's what I'm seeing from the data. The point of ecosystems is that it's a catalyst for learning about growing, which helps entrepreneurs predict and overcome growth challenges when they encounter them.