Mechanisms Fostering Tech Start-up Emergence in the Nigerian Digital Ecosystem

Globally, entrepreneurs see Information Technology (IT) as a magic ingredient that propels creativity and innovative capabilities. Thus, making tech start-ups a catalyst for job creation, economic growth, and national development. However, achieving viable tech start-ups emergence is problematic and unpredictable. Especially in resource-constrained environments like sub-Saharan Africa where the diverse form of environmental complexities and uncertainties exist. Prior studies have shown to explain tech start-ups emergence. Yet, most of the investigations did not consider multi-dimensional perspectives to emergent events (i.e. opportunity discovery and selection, team formation and domain consensus, bootstrapping, etc.) characterizing tech start-up emergence, and how underlying mechanisms triggers such events. Thus, drawing from activity theory, intelligence complex adaptive systems, and effectuation theory, we conducted a critical realist case study to investigate the multi-dimensional events describing tech start-up emergence and further explicate the generative mechanisms that must exist for such events to occur in the Nigerian digital/entrepreneurial ecosystem