Study of the Start-Up Ecosystem in Lima, Peru: Collective Case Study

According to the literature, businesses are driving economies and development worldwide as start-ups generate jobs and taxes and—since the last financial meltdown—entrepreneurs and innovation have become even more necessary in order to respond to new challenges in many countries, with certain ecosystem conditions required to spur the enterprise phenomenon. Although start-ups are a low-cost path to innovation with fast results, they must be set up by entrepreneurs eager to speed up the process of establishing new technology-based enterprises. According to the literature, start-ups are underpinned by an ecosystem that consists mainly of the entrepreneur community: mentors, incubators, accelerators, shared services providers, angel investors, venture capital investors, universities, government support agencies, and links to other ecosystems. This article thus focuses on the entrepreneurship ecosystem in order to offer an overview of the technology-based ecosystem status in Lima, Peru, based on start-up case studies and identifying elements in the development process of each of the start-ups studied. Initially, a description and definition of different entrepreneurship ecosystem elements is given that could be present in technology-based enterprises and the entrepreneur. The case studies methodology is also presented, in addition to the corresponding process, whose core objectives are applied in this article: exploratory, allowing us to design a broader-ranging future research project in greater depth; and a descriptive, spotlighting what is happening in each specific start-up, establishing interlinked technology-based ecosystem elements and the characteristics of each of the case studies, including the business model and the sector to which it belongs. Finally, the similarities and differences noted among the start-ups are presented, followed by the corresponding conclusions.