Social entrepreneurial ecosystems: a regional perspective of México

Objective
The increasing number of private entities such as social enterprises, cooperatives, community-based enterprises and B-corps, have reconfigured entrepreneurial ecosystems in order to create new social equilibriums that guarantee increased levels of wellbeing. The Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EE) offers a systemic view of entrepreneurial activity, and allows to test in broader settings, such as regional, temporal and social arenas. Conceptually, regions with lower levels of poverty will have worst perceptions of their conditions to enhance their social EE explained by the agglomeration effects in the regional development literature.

Methodology
This study is based on the GEM’s National Experts’ Survey (NES) which measures the Entrepreneurial Framework Conditions (EFC) from the perspectives of groups of key informants. We use a very unique regional data from Mexico that includes an scale for social entrepreneurship for an special issue of the GEM team in 2015. In total N=188 experts were interviewed, 112 located in high-vulnerability and 76 in low-vulnerability regions. We first calculate the Cronbach’s Alpha test for the EFC measured by the NES, then proceed to the principal component analysis. Normality tests were conducted revealing that the variable considered was not normally distributed for both groups. Therefore, the Mann–Whitney U non-parametric test for mean comparison was selected as the most appropriate method to compare between both groups.

Results and Implications
The results revive the debate about the need to understand EE in broader settings considering the important dimension of geography and how low-vulnerability versus high-vulnerability regions inside a country differ in terms of economics activities, including social entrepreneurship.