From a marketplace of electronics to a digital entrepreneurial ecosystem (DEE): The emergence of a meta-organization in Zhongguancun, China

Extant studies on digital entrepreneurship have mainly focused on firm-level characteristics and overlooked the external environment, ie, the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem (DEE). This study intends to fill that gap by exploring how a DEE emerges. We adopt the meta-organization theory as our theoretical lens and conduct an in-depth case study at Zhongguancun, a budding DEE often referred to as China's Silicon Valley. Case analysis reveals that the emergence of a DEE is a process of forming a meta-organization, whereby labour is divided into 3 roles and effort is integrated via 2 processes. Our study contributes to the digital entrepreneurship literature by offering a community perspective. It also contributes to the literature on meta-organization, which has mainly focused on the globally distributed meta-organizations and overlooked the collocated meta-organizations such as a DEE. Regarding practical implications, policymakers and community leaders responsible for DEE development can use our findings to develop their local DEEs.