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Abstract

Entrepreneurship ecosystem research explains convergence through mechanisms such as informational cascades, institutional isomorphism, herding, clustering, and knowledge spillovers. While these perspectives account for how convergence occurs, they provide a more limited explanation of why entrepreneurs, investors, and other ecosystem participants come to pursue the same ventures, industries, and measures of success. This paper argues that convergence reflects the social mediation of desire. Drawing on René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, it develops a conceptual framework explaining how entrepreneurial desire becomes aligned within shared evaluative environments. The paper advances three propositions. First, ecosystems characterized by evaluative monism are more likely to converge around dominant venture archetypes. Second, ecosystems that increase perceived comparability among participants through shared and highly visible arenas of evaluation intensify mimetic convergence. Third, the relationship between evaluative monism and convergence is conditioned by the associational environment of the place in which the ecosystem is embedded. Ecosystems situated within thicker associational contexts sustain greater evaluative differentiation, dispersing objects of desire and reducing convergence around dominant entrepreneurial narratives. By introducing mimetic desire as the mechanism through which entrepreneurial preferences become aligned, this paper extends entrepreneurship ecosystem theory beyond resource coordination to explain how ecosystems shape what participants come to regard as worth pursuing.

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