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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how entrepreneurship culture affects start-up and venture capital co-evolution during the early evolution of an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) and its ability to foster the emergence of ambitious entrepreneurship as an outcome of its activity. Unlike studies that capture entrepreneurship culture at the national level, this study focusses specifically on the culture of venture capital-financed entrepreneurship and understanding its implications to the development of venture capital markets and successful firm-level outcomes within ecosystems. Design/methodology/approach Relying on EE and organisational imprinting theory, this study specifies characteristics of venture capital-financed entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley to illustrate the American way of building start-ups and examine whether they have as imprints affected to the entrepreneurship culture and start-up and venture capital co-evolution in Finland during the early evolution of its EE between 1980 and 1997. Findings The results illustrate venture capital-financed entrepreneurship culture as a specific example of entrepreneurship culture beneath the national level that can vary across geographies like the findings concerning Finland demonstrate. The findings show that this specific culture matters through having an impact on the structural evolution and performance of EEs and on the ways how they deliver or fail to deliver benefits to entrepreneurs. Originality/value The results show that venture capital-financed entrepreneurship and the emergence of success stories as outcomes of start-up and venture capital co-evolution within an EE are connected to a specific type of entrepreneurship culture. This paper also contributes to the literature by connecting the fundamentals of organisational imprinting to EE research.

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In this paper we conduct a review on the studies on firm growth and suggest some criticism towards growth research so far. We address that it could be time to approach firm growth from processual and cross-disciplinary starting point. Based on this assumption we carried out a literature review of the studies on firm growth, entrepreneurship, organizational change and high-tech industry. We identified the following factors to have an impact on the emergence of growth of a new high-tech firm: 1) resources of the firm, 2) firm's strategic posture, 3) business opportunity, 4) business environment 5) growth behavior, 6) opportunity exploitation, and 7) outcome of the process. Building on these elements and interaction among them we describe the behavior which we call in this paper as generative mechanisms of growth. We also propose a theoretical framework for studying the emergence of growth of a new high-tech firm.

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