Designing an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development Model in Border Areas (Study of Kurdistan Province)

Given the conditions associated with the development of entrepreneurial activities in Iran, the study of the indicators of the entrepreneurial ecosystem can play an important role in identifying entrepreneurial opportunities in different parts of the country. Because entrepreneurship is not a single phenomenon and occurs in the context of its own ecosystem, the first step in designing and implementing entrepreneurship development policies is to recognize the entrepreneurial ecosystem at different national and provincial levels and identify bottlenecks that wear out the country's competitive advantages. This research aims at designing an entrepreneurship ecosystem development model at Kurdistan Province.. The data collection tool was a semi-structured interview. The validity and reliability of the research were confirmed after the measurement. We conducting interviews with 15 experts, and analyzed the interviews using the thematic analysis. The results of the research is a model with thirty four basic themes. It consists of seven variables that includes social capital (with 7 dimensions), financial capital (with 12 dimensions), politics (with 11 dimensions), market (with 9 dimensions), human capital (with 5 dimensions), support (with 14 dimensions) and culture (with 9 dimensions). The network analysis process (ANP)shows the priority rank  of variables as follow: financial capital, politics, support, social capital, market, culture and human capital that were ranked first to seventh, respectively.