Universidad del Zulia (LUZ)
Revista Venezolana de Gerencia (RVG)
Año 31 No. 115, 2026, e311159
JULIO-SEPTIEMBRE
ISSN 1315-9984 / e-ISSN 2477-9423
Como citar: Ríos, J. P., Arias, F. J., Escalante, J. C., y Hernández-Betancur, J.-E.(2026). Contingent Governance and Sustainability in Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem. Revista Venezolana De Gerencia, 31(115), e311159. https://doi.org/10.52080/rvgluz.31.115.9
Contingent Governance and Sustainability in Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem
Ríos Mesa, Juan Pablo*
Arias Vargas, Francisco Javier**
Escalante, Juan Carlos***
Hernández-Betancur, Juan-Esteban****
Abstract
Medellín’s entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem has been shaped by public policy, institutional programs, universities, private actors and hybrid forms of governance. This article explores the effects of structural misalignment on organizational sustainability within this ecosystem. A qualitative exploratory-descriptive design was used, based on fifteen semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, public-sector representatives, academic actors and investors, complemented by documentary review and exploratory composite-score analysis. The findings show that the ecosystem has developed a high level of institutional differentiation, but weak integration mechanisms. This produces duplicated support programs, fragmented coordination, dependence on public actors and higher transaction costs for entrepreneurs. The results also reveal that the technocentric orientation associated with the Software Valley strategy has reinforced organizational rigidity and has displaced social, cultural and hybrid ventures toward the margins of the ecosystem. The article concludes that the sustainability of local ventures depends not only on access to resources, but also on adaptive governance, balanced authority distribution and stronger inter-organizational articulation.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship ecosystem; organizational sustainability; contingent governance; inter-organizational articulation; neo-institutionalism.
Recibido: 06.04.26 Aceptado:01.06.26
* Magister en Estudios Organizacionales, Asesor del Centro de Emprendimiento, Transferencia e Innovación (CETI) Tecnológico de Antioquia Institución Universitaria, Colombia. E-mail: jpriosm@tdea.edu.co, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5817-1767.
** Doctor en Administración y Dirección de Empresas, Profesor en la Institución Universitaria de Envigado, Colombia. E-mail: fjarias@correo.iue.edu.co, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4483-1741.
*** Doctor en Educación, Profesor en el Tecnológico de Antioquia Institución Universitaria, Colombia. E-mail: juan.escalante@tdea.edu.co, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0754-0774.
**** Doctor en Ingeniería – Industria y Organizaciones, Profesor en el Tecnológico de Antioquia Institución Universitaria, Colombia. E-mail: juan.hernandez41@tdea.edu.co, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4060-6803.
Gobernanza contingente y sostenibilidad en el ecosistema de emprendimiento e innovación de Medellín
Resumen
El ecosistema de emprendimiento e innovación de Medellín se ha configurado a partir de políticas públicas, programas institucionales, universidades, actores privados y formas híbridas de gobernanza. Este artículo explora los efectos del desajuste estructural sobre la sostenibilidad organizacional dentro de dicho ecosistema. Se utilizó un diseño cualitativo exploratorio-descriptivo, basado en quince entrevistas semiestructuradas a emprendedores, representantes del sector público, actores académicos e inversionistas, complementadas con revisión documental y un análisis exploratorio de puntajes compuestos. Los hallazgos muestran que el ecosistema ha desarrollado un alto nivel de diferenciación institucional, pero con débiles mecanismos de integración. Esto genera duplicación de programas de apoyo, coordinación fragmentada, dependencia de actores públicos y mayores costos de transacción para los emprendedores. Los resultados también evidencian que la orientación tecnocéntrica asociada a la estrategia Software Valley ha reforzado la rigidez organizacional y ha desplazado emprendimientos sociales, culturales e híbridos hacia los márgenes del ecosistema. Se concluye que la sostenibilidad de los emprendimientos locales no depende solo del acceso a recursos, sino de una gobernanza adaptativa, una distribución más equilibrada de la autoridad y una mayor articulación interorganizacional.
Palabras clave: Ecosistema de emprendimiento; sostenibilidad organizacional; gobernanza contingente; articulación interorganizacional; neoinstitucionalismo.
1. Introduction
Innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems are more than just markets or a mechanical blending of public and private initiatives. Instead, they are deeply social networks built on institutional frameworks and relationships. Their success depends on how interconnected actors cooperate, coordinate, or conflict over the legitimacy of their goals. Consequently, understanding Medellín’s ecosystem requires looking beyond a simple directory of actors, programs, or isolated projects. True analysis requires examining how the broader institutional environment shapes—and is shaped by—the internal dynamics driving the ecosystem every day.
When organizations and networks lose their adaptive capacity, structural misalignments inevitably follow. This leads to severe coordination failures, organizational rigidity, and dwindling long-term sustainability (Hammouch et al., 2024). To counter this rigidity, Organizational Studies must shift its focus. Instead of viewing the entrepreneur as a lone, heroic figure judged strictly by financial returns, we should return to the concept‘s theoretical roots: entrepreneurship as a process of mobilizing resources and creating value under uncertainty. By framing the entrepreneur as an agent of economic change who builds „new organized combinations“ (Schumpeter, 2021), the analytical focus naturally shifts away from individual traits and toward the collective process of systemic innovation.
Rather than treating innovation as a narrow, technocentric output, this study approaches it as a dynamic product of organizational and interorganizational processes. This framework is constructed from three complementary, practice-based lenses:
•Open Systems Theory: Viewed through this perspective, an ecosystem is a network of interdependent units whose survival relies on continuous exchange with their environment von Bertalanffy, 1968). This lens allows us to analyze Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem (EIE) as a relational configuration of actors, boundaries, exchanges, and feedback loops, rather than a static, closed structure.
•Contingency Theory: Approached as an ongoing process, situational contingency dictates that organizational success depends on aligning internal structures with environmental demands. Specifically, organizations thrive when their degrees of differentiation and integration effectively match the uncertainty of their environment (Tushman & Nadler, 1978).
•Organizational Institutionalism: This final lens articulates how concerns over social legitimacy and isomorphic pressures—the institutional drive to conform—shape formal organizational structures and their driving discourses.
Together, these three theoretical pillars provide the analytical tools needed to unpack the central tensions at the heart of this study: (a) actor versus process, (b) efficiency versus legitimacy, (c) coordination versus fragmentation, and (d) adaptation versus rigidity.
This article bridges Contingency Theory and Neo-institutionalism to explore how structural misalignment impacts organizational sustainability within Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem (EIE). Specifically, it examines how weak integration mechanisms, political dependence, organizational rigidity, and technocentric institutional pressures collectively jeopardize the viability of local ventures. Utilizing a qualitative case study of this hybrid ecosystem, the research develops three core analytical propositions grounded in empirical field data and exploratory evidence. Rather than rigid statistical principles, these propositions serve as theory-driven frameworks designed to guide future comparative studies of hybrid innovation ecosystems.
The historical evolution of the ecosystem is framed by successive municipal policy cycles. During the 2004–2007 period, Cultura E became one of the city’s main entrepreneurship policy instruments, combining business creation, strengthening programs and institutional support for entrepreneurial culture. Between 2008 and 2011, the creation of Ruta N constituted a renewed attempt to institutionalize and coordinate the innovation agenda of Medellín, with the explicit purpose of positioning the city as a regional reference in science, technology and innovation (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008). As the number of actors, programs and initiatives grew, however, internal uncertainty about how to coordinate and articulate resources increased in parallel. Between 2020 and 2023, under the “Software Valley” strategy, the city committed itself to science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. That technocentric orientation, nonetheless, gave rise to new tensions, such as the concentration of power and resources in a reduced number of nodes and the risk that social or cultural ventures would be displaced (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2020).
Accordingly, the general objective of this study is to explore the effects of structural misalignment on organizational sustainability within Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem. More specifically, the article analyzes how governance arrangements, inter-organizational articulation and contingent adaptability condition the sustainability of local ventures in a hybrid ecosystem marked by public-sector centralization, fragmented coordination and technocentric institutional pressures. The guiding research question is: How does structural misalignment affect organizational sustainability within Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem?
2. Methodological approach
This research design addresses a significant gap in the literature: the lack of attention given to Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystems (EIEs) from a Contingency Theory standpoint. Despite persistent theoretical and analytical ambiguities regarding how these ecosystems are organized—and the contingent conditions that dictate their function—empirical research remains sparse. To address this deficit, this study provides a comprehensive description of the organizational elements constituting the ecosystem, alongside an analysis of the specific contingent factors that shape its operation. The research question will need a flexible research design in order to obtain knowledge regarding a hybrid yet developing organizational system. The exploratory component of the research will help identify and understand the conditions that either enable or inhibit entrepreneurship and innovation, and the descriptive component of the research will allow for the characterization of the ecosystem as a whole, the actors who make up the ecosystem, the roles of the actors, and the processes by which the actors are coordinated and centralized.
3. Population and Sampling Strategy
The target population for this study comprises key stakeholders within Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem (EIE)—a complex network of diverse entities linked by mutual interdependence and interaction. To systematically analyze governance and ecosystem articulation (Van de Ven, 2017), the core entities within Medellín’s EIE were categorized into four distinct groups based on their institutional logics and operational rationales:
•Group 1: Startups and Enablers: Founders of high-technology or high-societal-impact startups, alongside representatives from incubation and acceleration programs.
•Group 2: Public and State-Sponsored Entities: Representatives from public organizations—such as Medellín’s Secretary of Economic Development, Ruta N, and Parque E—who champion state-sponsored economic development initiatives within the ecosystem.
•Group 3: Academic Institutions and Alliances: Higher education institutions, including Universidad EAFIT and Institución Universitaria Tecnológico de Antioquia, as well as collaborative university networks like MEUNE.
•Group 4: Investors and Capital Providers: Angel investors and venture capital (VC) professionals critical to identifying and understanding the financial constraints facing local ventures.
To select specific participants from these groups, the study employed purposive sampling—a non-probabilistic strategy designed to select individuals based on their specialized knowledge, experience, or strategic positioning relative to the phenomenon under study (Etikan et al., 2016). Rather than pursuing statistical representativeness, this strategy aimed to secure deep qualitative access to actors possessing firsthand experience and high-level strategic insights into Medellín’s EIE, thereby providing the empirical depth required for robust qualitative analysis.
Only people with high-level experience, a minimum of five years, strategic location in the articulation or financing of projects, and specialized knowledge in fields related to Organizational Studies, innovation, entrepreneurship, economics or public policy were included. The justification of the sample size was based on the criterion of theoretical saturation. Data collection was stopped after interviewing 15 actors because the inclusion of new participants no longer generated substantially new categories, relationships or interpretive perspectives.
This decision finds support in the qualitative literature on saturation, which has shown that, when the sample is composed of relatively homogeneous experts and the interview design is sufficiently focused, the main thematic patterns tend to emerge after a limited number of conversations. Saturation, in any case, has to be evaluated against the scope, the heterogeneity of the sample and the analytical purpose of each study (Guest et al., 2006; Saunders et al., 2018). For the present research, the 15 interviews proved sufficient to reach saturation in the main categories associated with Contingency Theory, institutional logics and power networks, and at the same time allowed for adequate diversity among entrepreneurs, public actors, academic institutions and investors.
3.1. Data Collection
The semi-structured interview was chosen as the main instrument for data collection because it makes it possible to address predefined analytical categories without losing the flexibility participants need to expand, qualify or redirect their answers.
This technique is especially well suited to the study of organizational phenomena and ecosystems, given that it allows the researcher to recover how actors themselves interpret institutional relationships, coordination problems, power dynamics and informal practices (González-Vega et al., 2022; Kallio et al., 2016).The semi-structured format ensured that all theoretical categories established by the analytical framework were covered, while also allowing interviewees to develop their perspectives and reveal unexpected dynamics of power, culture or conflict.
3.2. Coding Protocol
ATLAS.ti software was used to organize and analyze the corpus of 15 semi-structured interviews, following procedures commonly used in computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (Friese, 2019). The decision to work with complete transcripts made it possible to retain the original language of the interviews. The thematic analysis combined a deductive and an inductive logic, drawing on the principles of thematic analysis put forward by Braun and Clarke (2006).
On the deductive side, the categories were taken from the theoretical framework: context, differentiation, integration and adaptability. On the inductive side, context-specific codes such as “Software Valley” and “seed capital” emerged from the empirical material itself. The coding work unfolded in four phases, in accordance with the qualitative coding procedures systematized by Saldaña (2021). The first was an open coding phase, which operated with in vivo codes such as “each one on their own” or “resources do not reach the entrepreneur.” The second was an axial coding phase, in which the codes were grouped into organizational categories linked to Contingency Theory.
The third was a relational coding phase, devoted to mapping the inter-organizational ties and to weighing their strength. The fourth was a selective coding phase, in which the findings were integrated into an explanatory model.
3.3. Criteria of Methodological Rigor and Limitations
To safeguard the coherence and internal validity of the results, three forms of triangulation were applied throughout the study. The first, data triangulation, deliberately put the perspectives of the four stakeholder groups in dialogue with one another. The second, theoretical triangulation, kept the analysis from being read solely through the lens of Contingency Theory: Network Theory was incorporated to interpret fragmentation, relational density and weak ties among the actors of the ecosystem (Borgatti & Halgin, 2011), while Neo-institutionalism made it possible to account for the isomorphic pressures that lead organizations to reproduce practices.
Considered jointly, these frameworks gave room to a broader and more empirically grounded interpretation of the case. The design was completed with methodological and source triangulation: the evidence drawn from the interviews was contrasted in a systematic manner with historical documentary sources (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2020) and with the relevant academic literature.
Acknowledging the methodological limitations of this study is essential for accurately contextualizing its findings:
Exploratory-Descriptive Scope: Given the study’s exploratory and descriptive nature, the findings do not permit causal inferences regarding the dynamics of Medellín’s EIE. The results exclusively map and describe the internal organizational structures and stakeholder perceptions at a specific point in time.
Purposive Sampling and Institutional Bias: By prioritizing institutional expert voices—specifically representatives from government, academia, and venture funds—the purposive sampling strategy risks introducing a systemic bias that over-reports or legitimizes existing formal structures.
Underrepresentation of Grassroots Actors: While the research instrument was specifically designed to capture ecosystem tensions, informal or community-based entrepreneurship voices may be underrepresented. This omission potentially restricts a more critical evaluation of systemic inequalities within the broader ecosystem.
Subjectivity and Extrapolation Risks: The analysis relies heavily on participant interpretation. Although this subjectivity was mitigated through rigorous documentary triangulation, the findings regarding ecosystem fragmentation primarily reflect stakeholders’ subjective perceptions of coordination. Consequently, caution must be exercised when extrapolating these findings into concrete, universally applicable governance models
The following results present the main forms of structural misalignment identified within Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem and examine how these dynamics affect organizational sustainability. The section combines qualitative evidence, network analysis and exploratory composite-score results to explain the ecosystem’s problems of coordination, rigidity and technocentric orientation.
3.4. Contingent Integration Failure
Illustrates 1 a word cloud generated in ATLAS.ti, reflecting the frequencies of the most recurrent codes identified during the open coding phase. This visual map highlights the central themes driving the ecosystem, where the predominance of specific terms indicates that stakeholder discourse primarily revolves around ecosystem structure, resource availability, and financial constraints. Contingency Theory posits that organizational effectiveness hinges on a precise alignment between an organization’s internal structure and the changing demands of its external environment.
Illustration 1
Main thematic patterns of Medellín’s entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem
In the case of Medellín’s EIE, the primary structural response to the city’s historical deindustrialization crisis was differentiation—the deliberate generation of a plurality of highly specialized actors (such as Ruta N, CEDEZO, Parque E, CREAME, and MEUNE) engineered to meet the unique demands of an emerging knowledge economy.
However, empirical evidence shows that this differentiation was not compensated by integration, understood as the coordination and conflict resolution mechanisms that ensure the system’s consistency. In this study, the absence of systemic articulation is interpreted as a contingent integration failure: an analytical category that describes how differentiated ecosystem actors remain weakly coordinated despite operating within the same institutional field. This failure restricts the ecosystem’s effectiveness by weakening coordination, increasing duplication and forcing entrepreneurs to perform integrative work that should be institutionally distributed. The coding of interviews confirms this structural failure, manifested in a lack of synergy and unified leadership and in a weakness of the relational mesh.
Illustration 2 presents a network map generated in ATLAS.ti to visualize the relationships among the main actors within Medellín’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Ecosystem. The nodes represent institutional actors identified during the interviews, while the connecting lines indicate the existence and intensity of inter-organizational relationships mentioned by participants during the coding process. Thicker and darker lines represent stronger and more recurrent relationships, whereas thinner or lighter lines indicate weaker or less frequent connections. Different colors were used to distinguish groups of actors according to their institutional role within the ecosystem (public sector, academia, entrepreneurs, investors and support organizations).
Illustration 2
Perceived relationships among ecosystem actors
Furthermore, this figure shows how actors consider that the network functions as a collection of separate parts and therefore cannot act together: “No synergy is perceived so that everything flows; each entity is on its own… and the dependence on public actors puts many activities at risk. This makes the entrepreneur a ‘resource hunter’.” Another interviewee stated: “There is a generalized disarticulation on the part of ecosystem actors… when it comes to receiving support, where they can be served by various actors, but in general they receive the same support.”
On the other hand, Illustration 3 shows the dispersion and weakness of key links: the connection between Entrepreneurs and Government is weak, as is the connection between Entrepreneurs and Large Companies and between Universities and Investors.
Illustration 3
Power asymmetry and relational fragmentation in the ecosystem
This dispersion increases the entrepreneur’s dependency on institutional actors and raises transaction costs. Entrepreneurs are “tired of mentoring and training,” pointing to a mismatch between the supply of differentiation, mainly advisory support, and the contingent demand for integration, especially capital and market access. From a transaction-cost perspective, fragmented coordination increases the costs entrepreneurs face when they must move across disconnected institutional interfaces (Williamson, 1975).
The second structural mismatch is Organizational Rigidity; Illustration 4 is associated with mechanistic structures incapable of responding with the flexibility required by the high-uncertainty environment of entrepreneurship. In Medellín, this inflexibility is due to political dependence: the mayor’s office and Ruta N hold power and resources, generating instability and contingent vulnerability in the network. Vulnerability to the political cycle implies that the survival of much of the ecosystem’s offer depends on what the administration in office wants to spend, creating volatility: “Although there are support programs, it is noticeable that resources flow mainly from a political issue, and dependence on public actors puts many activities at risk.” Likewise, the centralization of power in the mayor’s office and Ruta N is reaffirmed in the wide range of roles attributed to them. The diagnosis of Contingency Theory is visualized in the Contingent Integration Failure: a hypertrophy in differentiation (multiplicity of actors and programs) without the necessary integration.
Illustration 4
Contingent integration failure in Medellín’s ecosystem
3.5. Technocentric Paradigm
The third structural mismatch stems from a rigid technocentric paradigm that consolidated between 2020 and 2023, driven by a strategic institutional push toward science, technology, and the “Software Valley” initiative. This focus created a systemic bias favoring technological and product innovation at the expense of vital social and administrative innovations. Ecosystem actors frequently note the intense pressure to replicate foreign models and the overvaluation of tech-first metrics, with one interviewee observing: “One of the problems has been trying to implement foreign models in the city and references to follow that are presented as possible recipes…”Because of this paradigm, centralized governance channels public investment and institutional support almost exclusively toward initiatives that meet strict criteria for technocentric legitimacy. Consequently, this narrow focus marginalizes critical local contingencies vital to Medellín’s broader socio-economic stability, such as widespread economic informality and the untapped potential of traditional firms. With high technology placed at the center of public priorities, the ecosystem generates forms of organizational exclusion that displace social, cultural and agriculturally oriented ventures with hybrid missions toward the margins of the development agenda (Table 1).
Table 1
Correlation matrix between constructs
|
Integration (Failure) |
Rigidity |
Technocentrism |
Sustainability |
|
|
Integration (Failure) |
1.00 |
0.77 |
0.77 |
-0.71 |
|
Rigidity |
0.77 |
1.00 |
0.55 |
-0.61 |
|
Technocentrism |
0.77 |
0.55 |
1.00 |
-0.63 |
|
Sustainability |
-0.71 |
-0.61 |
-0.63 |
1.00 |
3.6. Exploratory composite-score analysis
The exploratory model is grounded in Contingency Theory and Neo-institutionalism. It examines whether the relationships among technocentrism, organizational rigidity, integration failure and organizational sustainability are consistent with the qualitative interpretation of the case. As a complementary exploratory procedure, composite scores were calculated for each construct by averaging the corresponding items. Correlation and regression analyses were then used only to examine the direction of the relationships among constructs. These results should not be interpreted as a full structural equation model, causal evidence or statistically generalizable findings.
Table 2
Exploratory regression results based on composite scores
|
Relationship |
Direction |
Exploratory coefficient |
Interpretation |
|
Technocentrism → Rigidity |
Positive |
0.54 |
Consistent with the qualitative interpretation |
|
Technocentrism → Integration Failure |
Positive |
0.57 |
Consistent with the qualitative interpretation |
|
Rigidity → Integration Failure |
Positive |
0.58 |
Consistent with the qualitative interpretation |
|
Technocentrism → Sustainability |
Negative |
-0.33 |
Consistent with the qualitative interpretation |
|
Rigidity → Sustainability |
Negative |
-0.28 |
Consistent with the qualitative interpretation |
|
Integration Failure → Sustainability |
Negative |
-0.45 |
Consistent with the qualitative interpretation |
3.7. Integrated Interpretation of Findings
The case of Medellín offers valuable linkages to comparative research, demonstrating that ecosystems develop along a directional pathway rather than through linear, top-down policy designs. Instead, ecosystems evolve through dynamic, continually changing interactions over time among all constituent actors, resources, and institutional environments (Mack & Mayer, 2016). Furthermore, the long-term resilience of such ecosystems is deeply interconnected, bridging the micro-level development of individual entrepreneurs with macro-level collective institutional conditions (Roundy et al., 2017).
To this extent, ecosystem sustainability depends on far more than the mere availability of institutional support; it relies heavily on the presence of social capital, high levels of trust, and a dense network of relationships. These elements collectively enable entrepreneurs to effectively leverage available resources, ensuring long-term organizational viability and the capacity to scale (Theodoraki et al., 2018). Furthermore, contemporary literature indicates that ecosystems function differently depending on the specific logics—namely resource, interaction, and governance—that dictate actor behavior, a reality especially pronounced in emerging economies where institutional voids and coordination failures are most evident (Cao & Shi, 2021).
Consequently, the central argument of this article is that Medellín’s ecosystem cannot be evaluated solely by the sheer quantity of its institutions and programs. Instead, evaluative frameworks must prioritize the degree of structural integration among these entities and how effectively they enable entrepreneurs to adapt within an uncertain environment (Wurth et al., 2022).
4. Conclusions
The findings directly answer the central research question by demonstrating that structural misalignment significantly undermines organizational sustainability within Medellín’s EIE. This vulnerability is driven by the compounding effects of weak integration mechanisms, political dependence, organizational rigidity, and technocentric institutional pressures. While the ecosystem has successfully expanded by generating a plurality of specialized actors, programs, and support institutions, this structural differentiation has not been matched by a corresponding coordination capacity.
Consequently, local ventures must navigate a fragmented environment where access to resources, market connections, and institutional backing depends on isolated programs, shifting political priorities, and asymmetric inter-organizational relationships rather than a coherent ecosystem strategy. Ultimately, organizational sustainability is jeopardized not by a scarcity of initiatives, but by a governance structure that fails to provide the adaptive articulation necessary for hybrid ventures to effectively consolidate, scale, and sustain their complex economic and social missions.
The negative conditioning of sustainability occurs through two predominant organizational pathologies: Contingent Integration Failure and Organizational Rigidity due to Isomorphism. The former is evidenced in the fragmentation of the network and the duplication of programs, where actors work in isolation. The fragility of links between entrepreneurs, investors and large companies hinders the integration of capital and market, and forces the entrepreneur to be their own integrating agent, raising transaction costs. The latter corresponds to a hierarchical and centralized structure that depends on the public focal actor; political dependence imposes practices more sensitive to political logic than to market logic, forcing a mechanistic model on a network that requires being organic and adaptable. The technocentrism of the “Software Valley” is an act of mimetic isomorphism that creates an organizational bias blind to local contingencies, resulting in the exclusion of businesses with a hybrid mission.
In sum, governance dynamics, inter-organizational articulation, and contingent adaptability directly dictate organizational sustainability by exposing local ventures to a fragmented and politically rigid structure—one that ultimately fails to efficiently mobilize the critical capital and market access required for business scaling.
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