The Science

A peer-reviewed framework.
Operating at scale.

OSE is the first observatory built directly on top of a peer-reviewed framework. Every score, every diagnostic, every recommendation traces back to specific findings in published research — 16 years of longitudinal data, 4,000+ actors observed, 1.4 million+ relational observations.

Peer-reviewed publications

TFSC 2023 · Gestion 2000 2024

Years of data

2008 → 2024

Countries observed

MENA, Africa, France

4,117

Actors documented

across all studies

1.38M+

Relational obs.

tie-level data

Non-financial supports

taxonomy

Theoretical layers

Technical → Psychological

Service categories

VRIO assessed

Why this matters

From flat inventories to layered architectures.

Most entrepreneurial-ecosystem research treats places as additive inventories: more accelerators, more capital, more programs. The Hidden Architecture review — synthesizing 40 empirical studies — and the Beyond Capital problematizing review — covering 55 — challenge that assumption directly: resource abundance is necessary but never sufficient.

Entrepreneurs fail not because finance is absent, but because they cannot access, combine, or convert intangible resources — mentoring, legitimacy, identity support, psychological resilience — into action under uncertainty. Those supports are the “connective tissue” of an ecosystem and are systematically under-counted by traditional indices.

The OSE framework reorganizes ecosystem analysis around 5 layers, 14 non-financial supports, and 5 measurable value-flow constructs. What follows is the scientific scaffolding behind every diagnostic Expert produces.

Theoretical foundation

The 5 layers of an entrepreneurial ecosystem

A pyramidal hierarchy where foundational layers (technical, cognitive) condition higher-order layers (symbolic, psychological).

Technical

Productization, market access, legal compliance

Operational enablers that turn ideas into viable products. The base of the pyramid: without prototyping, market access, or licensing, no higher-order support produces ventures. Across the 40 studies in Hidden Architecture, technical supports were the most frequently documented dimension.

Non-financial supports: Innovation & Prototyping (labs, R&D access, MVPs) · Market Access & Sales (channel access, scaling partnerships) · Legal & Regulatory Assistance (IP, licensing)

"Beyond Capital" review confirms that ecosystems abundant in finance still fail when productization infrastructure is missing.

Cognitive

Knowledge transfer, business planning, team building

Absorptive capacity — the entrepreneur's ability to acquire, integrate, and apply codified and tacit knowledge as technologies and markets shift. Knowledge transfer was reported in 28 of 40 studies.

Non-financial supports: Knowledge Transfer & Skill Development · Business Planning & Strategy · Team Building & Human Capital

Hidden Architecture warns that "training may not translate into action" without higher-layer supports.

Relational

Mentorship, social capital, transnational networks

Trust-based ties through which entrepreneurs reach resources they cannot internally generate. Embodies the relational view of competitive advantage applied to ecosystems. Tie persistence and birth-stage / mature-stage connectivity are the decisive discontinuity factors.

Non-financial supports: Mentorship & Coaching (advisory boards) · Networking & Social Capital (matchmaking, peer communities)

Sticky Ties (TFSC 2023): across 4 territories and 685 actors, "the best performing EEs rely on strong ties with practical supportive actors".

Symbolic

Legitimacy, signaling, reputation

External legitimacy — the credibility entrepreneurs need before they have a track record. Endorsements, demo days, certifications and media visibility act as low-cost signals that reduce the liability of newness.

Non-financial supports: Legitimacy & Signaling (incubator endorsement, certifications) · Infrastructure & Visibility (co-working, awards, media)

Hidden Architecture: legitimacy is "foundational rather than developmental" — a deficit at this layer can render finance unusable.

Psychological

Identity, resilience, agency

The apex of the pyramid. Sustains confidence and identity under uncertainty. A discouraged founder cannot deploy mentorship or finance — psychological supports are not soft extras, they are the conditions under which all lower-layer supports become usable.

Non-financial supports: Emotional & Psychological Support (counseling, peer-support groups, reflective coaching, identity work)

Beyond Capital: only 9 of 55 studies directly examine psychological mechanisms — "important yet dramatically under-studied".

Operational science

Ecosystems as meta-organizations.

Ahrne & Brunsson’s organizational theory tradition reframes entrepreneurial ecosystems as meta-organizations — formal associations of organizations with graduated membership boundaries, governance, and collective outcomes. This replaces flat actor inventories with a measurable architecture of value flows.

Creation

Where new resources are produced

Access

Who can effectively reach them

Intermediation

Which actors enable diffusion

Capture

Who absorbs the value

Distribution

How equitably value spreads

Each construct maps to a tractable network metric: Resource Access Scores (RAS) for effective reach, Intermediation Value (IV) for enabling capacity, max-flow and node-disjoint paths for value-chain capacity and redundancy, plus Gini and percolation for inequality and robustness.

Empirical demonstration · Morocco 2008–2024

The network grew. The flow shrank.

Across 12 rolling six-year windows, Morocco’s ecosystem expanded from 61 organizations and 259 edges to 102 organizations and 542 edges. Yet flow performance deteriorated: RAS Gini and IV concentration worsened, zero node-disjoint paths appeared in any period, and Morocco was consistently classified as a “Guided platform” archetype. The paper concludes: “organizational architecture, not factor endowments, drives outcomes”.

Pathways to performance

Two equifinal pathways.
Both depend on testing.

The fsQCA on 7 MENA economies — 1,829 actors, 628,861 relational observations — yields two equifinal configurations leading to high New Business Density. Both are anchored on strong productization supports (prototyping & testing). They diverge on what surrounds them.

Productization-led

Inclusion = 0.981PRI = 0.975

Core: Strong prototyping + testing infrastructure

In the absence of strong HR, legal, and sales services

Institutional-led

Inclusion = 0.911PRI = 0.856

Core: Strong HR and legal supports

Compensating for absent prototyping; testing remains present

Operational implication: the productization layer (physical prototyping, certified testing) is non-negotiable. Building human capital and regulatory clarity matters, but only as a substitute pathway and only if testing is already in place. This argues against scattered, additive ecosystem investments and in favor of concentrating effort on the midstream productization segment first.

Published research

Peer-reviewed publications.

Each OSE diagnostic links back to one or more of these publications — indexed on Google Scholar, citable, traceable.

Full author profile on Google Scholar →

Sticky Ties: Quest for Structural Inter-organizational Configurations

Published 2023

Persistent ties and the birth/mature-stage discontinuity.

Method: Longitudinal network analysis · 685 actors · 155,470 observations · 4 territories

Authors: Guéneau · Chabaud · Chalus-Sauvannet

Best-performing EEs rely on strong ties with practical supportive actors — accessibility matters more than mere presence.

Target: Technological Forecasting & Social Change · DOI →

A structural and processual approach to entrepreneurial ecosystems: the case of Lyon area

Published 2024

Articulating structure and process in a regional ecosystem.

Method: Mixed-method case study · Lyon entrepreneurial ecosystem

Authors: Guéneau · Chalus-Sauvannet

Demonstrates how the structural composition of an ecosystem and its processes co-evolve — neither can be assessed in isolation.

Target: Management & Prospective (Gestion 2000) · DOI →

Entrepreneurial ecosystems structure: a measurement framework and first findings in African low-income countries

Defended 2022

Doctoral dissertation laying out the OSE measurement framework.

Method: Quantitative graph theory + web scraping + fsQCA · 8 countries

Authors: Guéneau (sup. Chabaud)

Foundation paper for OSE: first systematic measurement framework for ecosystem structure in low-income African contexts.

Target: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne · PhD · DOI →

In development

Working papers extending the OSE framework

Several extensions are in active development — The Hidden Architecture of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Beyond Capital, EE as Meta-Organizations: Morocco 2008–2024, EE Value Chain, The Seed and the Soil: Divergent Trajectories in MENA. They feed the Premium and VVIP tiers of OSE Expert as evidence accumulates.

Request access to a working paper draft →

From theory to algorithm

The metrics behind every diagnostic.

Resource Access Scores (RAS)

Effective reach for each actor — operationalizes the 'Access' construct of the meta-org framework.

Intermediation Value (IV)

Enabling capacity. Captures whether an actor is a connector, a hoarder, or a peripheral player.

Max-flow + node-disjoint paths

Ford-Fulkerson + Menger applied to the value chain. Reveals true capacity and redundancy.

Gini · Percolation curves

Inequality of access across actors + how robust the network is to targeted removal.

Community detection (Louvain)

Identifies sub-communities and the bridges between them — Granovetter's weak-tie thesis at scale.

Configurational logic (fsQCA)

Set-theoretic identification of equifinal pathways — multiple recipes can lead to the same outcome.

VRIO assessment

Each support service evaluated for Value, Rarity, Imitability, Organization — 9 categories.

Centrality (degree · betweenness · eigenvector)

Different measures, different policy implications. Triangulated, not picked individually.

Tie persistence (longitudinal)

Stable cooperation patterns across rolling windows — the 'sticky ties' that constitute the ecosystem's spine.

Why traditional ecosystem indices miss it.

Traditional approach	OSE approach
Self-reported surveys	Big Data + qualification (28,500+ actors)
N=200 sample, biased coverage	N=4,117 across 6 papers, 1.4M+ ties
Static snapshot, 1 year	16-year longitudinal (2008–2024)
Isolated actor counts	Network-flow analysis (RAS, IV, max-flow)
Single recipe assumed	Equifinal pathways (fsQCA configurations)
Capital-centric	5 layers · 14 non-financial supports
Anglo-centric calibration	Africa/MENA-grounded indicators

Peer review

Guided by world-class scholars.

David B. Audretsch

Indiana University

Saras Sarasvathy

Darden School of Business

Erik Stam

Utrecht University

Karim Messeghem

Univ. Montpellier

View full Scientific Council & Advisory Board →

Read the papers. Audit the methodology.

We share working drafts and published versions on request. The framework is open to peer challenge — that’s what makes it a science.

See research outputs →Request a draft

The OSE Briefing

One email a month. The signals that matter.

Curated insights from our 117 ecosystems — new country reports, ranking shifts, methodology notes. No fluff, no spam, unsubscribe in 1 click.

By subscribing you agree to our privacy policy. We never share your data.

2 100+ readers14 ministries subscribed38 universities

A peer-reviewed framework.Operating at scale.