Entrepreneurship ecosystem mapping: Process, importance and experience

On the occasion of Global Entrepreneurship Week, EMK center started a campaign on entrepreneurship with a dialogue on ecosystem.

In a session, Erik Azulay, Executive Director at Nexus Incubator, New Delhi; Bijon Islam, CEO of LightCastle Partners & Asif U Ahmed, Assistant Professor, ULAB & Acting Director, EMK Center talked about the entrepreneurship ecosystem and the importance of mapping, read a press release.

Nexus incubator offers selected startups unparalleled access to networks of industry and government partners, training with the top commercialization experts, and extensive mentor network in New Delhi. The Executive Director of the company, Erik Azulay, said, "Entrepreneurship is a hard journey and the ecosystem and the community supports the entrepreneur to grow to be successful. Actors like accelerators, incubators, investors, policymakers all intervene from their own spaces. For a larger scale, we need community. Silicon Valley, Austin, Singapore are some examples."

Bijon Islam, co-founder and CEO of LightCastle Partners, an organization that focuses on creating data-driven opportunities for growth and impact for development partners, corporates, SMEs and Startups said, "At Lightcastle, we always focused on the uprising sectors in the economy for the last four years. We have seen the digital financing ranked topped during this pandemic. So with our ecosystem mapping and business confidence reports, we are helping the ecosystem players to act."

An entrepreneur, academic and development practitioner, Asif U Uddin ended the session by saying, "Fostering entrepreneurship has become a core component of economic development across the world and the predominant metaphor for fostering entrepreneurship as an economic development strategy is the 'entrepreneurial ecosystem'. If we were to prevent the enthusiasm for the entrepreneurial ecosystem from fizzling out like other concepts, we need to get a better grip on the topic."