Digitalization as a Tool to Facilitate the Development of Skåne’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Sammanfattning: Fostering entrepreneurship has become fundamental to economic development in cities and countries globally. The emergence of digital tools and services has created novel ways of pursuing entrepreneurship. Sweden ranks as the third most digitalized EU country, so this thesis aims to investigate how digitalization has facilitated the development of one of its most progressive Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) in the region of Skåne. Previous research has often laid out and explained the development and functioning of EEs. However, the impact of digitalization on said development remains relatively uninvestigated. As Human Capital, Finance, and Policy constitute three overarching components of Isenberg’s (2011) model of the EE, this thesis applied an inductive approach and conducted semi-structured interviews with representatives from each of those components to gather empirical data. By implementing techniques from thematic analysis, the authors could derive four main findings. In addition to considerably impacting day-to-day activities, interviewees cited the Covid-19 pandemic as a key to accelerating digitalization, global teams, and the concept of remote work. The emergence and adoption of digital tools such as Slack, Zoom, Notion, and Microsoft Teams facilitated organizational workflow and, in turn, enabled better collaboration between and within components of Skåne’s EE. The facilitated access to digital tools has also democratized entrepreneurship by lowering the threshold of new venture creation. Additionally, digitalization has allowed Skåne to establish itself on the international stage and compete with bigger EEs. This thesis suggests that future research on digitalization’s impact on EEs should; (1) Attempt to translate these learnings into practicalities; (2) Develop a framework to determine when an EE evolves into a Digital Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (DEE); (3) Examine the implications of Web3 on EEs and DEEs