Innovation and renewal have during recent decades become the engine of economic growth. 
Governments and authorities on European, national, and local level strongly attempt to stimulate innovative entrepreneurship.

The ecosystem approach (see the scheme to the right) gives us a language for the diagnoses of strengths and weaknesses of the socio-economic structure of a region with the purpose to arrive at targeted policy interventions, aimed at raising the welfare in the region. This can be done by the creation of institutional entities and by targeted programs and subsidies for stimulating innovators.
Through these programs and subsidies a 'market' has emerged for coaching startup-entrepreneurs and the involved parties tend to call it an 'innovation ecosystem'.
But quite often, the 'ecosystem' includes the institutions and suppliers of intermediary services, while the parties that have to deliver value creation, the individual innovators and their startup and scale-up companies, seldom are 'member' of the ecosystem.

Because more than 95% of the new organisations fail, mostly during the transition to the scale-up phase, we have, together with some regional influencers, studied the reasons why, and what can be done about it, and how an ecosystem of the real innovators (the parties we expect to create value) can be realised.
In the chapter From startup to Scale-Up we show how we, in the Dutch Zwolle region (the fourth economic region in the Netherland), came to a number of actions.