Harnessing Digital Twins
Fostering city-scale entrepreneurial ecosystems
Entrepreneurial ecosystems are difficult to observe and govern because they are distributed across places, organisations, networks, infrastructure, and flows of information.
What the paper argues
The paper explores how digital-twin thinking might support city-scale entrepreneurial ecosystems. It treats digital twins not only as engineering artefacts, but as a way to represent, monitor, and coordinate complex urban innovation systems.
The argument is conceptual: if cities can model physical infrastructure through digital twins, they may also be able to build better representations of entrepreneurial activity, support systems, bottlenecks, and intervention points.
Core idea: Digital twins can become governance tools for understanding and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems
Why it matters
The paper matters because innovation policy often lacks a live picture of the system it is trying to shape. Better representations can help cities understand where entrepreneurial support is concentrated, missing, or poorly connected.
Entrepreneurial ecosystems as designed systems
This connects to the broader work on place-based entrepreneurship, strategy education, and institutional infrastructure for innovation.
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