Innovation Ecosystems and Startup Performance: Comparative Institutional Insights from Morocco and South Korea

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-680-7_14How to use a DOI?

Keywords

innovation ecosystem; startup performance; scale-up; policy coherence; adaptive policy transfer; Morocco; South Korea

Abstract

This paper examines how the structural configuration of national innovation ecosystems shapes startup performance and what Morocco can learnthrough adaptive policy transferfrom South Korea’s more mature system. Building on recent ecosystem diagnostics and measurement approaches [1, 2] and integrating the 4Ps innovation lens (product, process, position, paradigm), we develop a comparative analytical framework linking ecosystem components (institutions, finance, talent, knowledge infrastructure, networks, and market access) to observable startup outcomes (formation, funding depth, scaling capacity, and exit readiness). The study adopts a qualitative comparative case-study design based on secondary sources, triangulating international benchmarks and country diagnostics, including OECD’s innovation policy evidence for Korea [3], ecosystem indicator frameworks [2], and global startup ecosystem benchmarking [4]. Findings indicate that South Korea’s advantages are associated less with isolated instruments than with systemic coordination across R&D diffusion, digital infrastructure, demand creation pathways, and scale-up finance; Morocco shows accelerating early-stage dynamism but a thinner scale-up and exit pipeline, suggesting gaps in scale-up pathways and institutional alignment. The paper contributes an ecosystem-to-performance mechanism map for emerging economies and offers measurement-ready, non-prescriptive directions for Morocco centered on sequencing, coordination, and monitoring of ecosystem coherence.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sara Bouya
AU  - Kenza El Kadiri
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/20
TI  - Innovation Ecosystems and Startup Performance: Comparative Institutional Insights from Morocco and South Korea
BT  - Proceedings of the Conference Morocco-Korea Cooperation: A Lever for Afro-Asian Development (MKC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 197
EP  - 206
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-680-7_14
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-680-7_14
ID  - Bouya2026
ER  -