Exploring the Nature of the Economical Ecosystem of SparkUp : A Case Study on Immigrant Startups

SparkUp is a community in Turku that works together with students, businesses and organizations by providing educational services and entrepreneurial activities. SparkUp wants to offer a community space where ideas and people are able to network and get together easily. The goal of this thesis was to explore the nature of SparkUp’s Ecosystem to determine whether the ecosystem is a Business Ecosystem, an Innovation Ecosystem or an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. In addition, this thesis investigated what value this ecosystem delivers to Immigrant Startups and what are the possible challenges that Immigrant Startups confront in this ecosystem. This research took a exploratory qualitative research approach by means of observation and asynchronous email interviews that were conducted with the Director of SparkUp and three Immigrant Startups that are a part of SparkUp’s Ecosystem. Additionally, three Finnish Startups (that were a part of SparkUp’s Ecosystem too) were interviewed in order to benchmark the findings. The results indicated that SparkUp’s Ecosystem has features of all three ecosystems, but Entrepreneurial Ecosystem is the best fit to describe SparkUp’s Ecosystem. The value-deliverables of SparkUp’s Ecosystem for Immigrant Startups were networking and moral support. This is while Finnish Startups also valued the moral support of SparkUp’s Ecosystem the most. The weaknesses of SparkUp’s Ecosystem were the financial and market support-offers that the ecosystem was not able to deliver sufficiently