Federica Fusaro
Federica is a PhD candidate at emlyon business school. She is broadly interested in how imaginaries enable or inhibit social innovations. In her dissertation, she studies how decontextualized and market-based framings of social problems may lead to innovations’ unintended consequences. She explores these questions in the context of entrepreneurship policies for marginalized communities in France.
Prior to joining academia, Federica has worked in different industries, including the IT Circular Economy sector.
Caught in the middle: Navigating competing ecosystem expectations around inclusive entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a path to inclusion, with intermediaries (e.g., incubators)supporting marginalized groups’ access to resources. Yet, intermediaries themselves depend on resources from broader ecosystems. When embedded in both “inclusion-focused” and“mainstream” ecosystems, intermediaries may face competing expectations from distinct inclusionary approaches through entrepreneurship. Through a two-year ethnography of a French incubator for marginalized groups, we find that the intermediary’s efforts to appease tensions arising from its ecosystem repositioning inadvertently led to exclusionary dynamics. We contribute to scholarship on inclusive entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial ecosystems and intermediaries, highlighting the need for diverse inclusionary outcomes and support mechanisms.