Chapter 9: The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Entrepreneurship, the identification and pursuit of opportunities for new value creation, is an important mechanism for economic growth and development (Bosma et al., 2018; Schumpeter, 1934; Wennekers & Thurik, 1999). Most research on entrepreneurship and economic growth and development has taken place in Europe and the United States, and the MENA region is still hardly researched in this respect. This is unfortunate, given the potential of entrepreneurship to tackle societal challenges like poverty, hunger, and unemployment. In this chapter, we analyze an entrepreneurial ecosystem within the MENA region that has gone through severe conflict (Naudé & Power, 2024) but has been able to develop positively afterwards, with several other challenges: the KRI. We focus on the nature and quality of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, as a lens to better understand how entrepreneurship is enabled and constrained in this particular MENA context, and how this leads to economic growth and development (cf. Wurth et al., 2022). The resulting economic growth and development could potentially trigger a virtuous cycle of entrepreneurial ecosystem development, in which successful entrepreneurship and economic development feedback into the subsequent quality of the ecosystem. The objective of this chapter is to gain insight into entrepreneurial ecosystems in the MENA region, and the KRI in particular. It focuses on how productive entrepreneurship can be enabled, while the reliance on natural resources (in particular oil) revenues is reduced. Understanding the entrepreneurial ecosystem in KRI is critical to identifying how these challenges can be addressed. This chapter provides an overview of the region’s current economic landscape and explores the opportunities and obstacles within KRI’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.