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.