This paper examines the role of agile leadership models in shaping the functioning and performance of entrepreneurial ecosystems operating within the digital economy. Current literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems highlights the role of digital infrastructures, institutional coupling and innovation networks but offers little about how leadership practices are at work in increasingly networked, multi-actor environments. In addition, although agile leadership has been a subject of study primarily in intra-organizational settings, patterns of leadership at the ecosystem level remain undertheorized. To address this gap the research utilizes a qualitative-integrative approach consisting in an exploratory content synthesis methodology using web-based peer-reviewed literature and professional case-studies on digital entrepreneurship, ecosystem governance, as well as agile management. The research is informed by the question as to how agile leadership models relate to coordination, innovation and value co-creation in digitally-mediated entrepreneurial ecosystems. The study delineates three mutually reinforcing leadership mechanisms by which ecosystems can respond to technological turbulence and institutional complexity: cognitive sense-making, relational coordination, and decentralized governance. The results demonstrate that the agile leadership contributes to ecosystem (i.e. network) resilience and innovation capability if it embraces distributed decision making, collective strategic narratives and learning-based collaboration among diverse or heterogeneous actors. Our paper enlarges the boundaries of our understanding since we conceptualize agile leadership as a systemic capability, not yet generated in a systematic way in the extant literature on both leadership and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The findings have implications for ecosystem builders, educators and policy makers interested in designing governance and leadership systems that support entrepreneurial performance in the digital economy.

The increasing digitalization of economic activity has led to the emergence of demand for advanced managerial skills, which keep organizations competitive in our dynamic and technology-led business environment. With evolving business models, the industries of today expect higher education institutions to help create and shape talent specifically in accordance with its needs, aligned and catering better towards the demands of the digital economy. This paper attempts to integrate a research agenda on digital skills with the field’s literature, focusing specifically on how business administration education may contribute to long-term competitiveness in this area. This paper investigates the extent to which business administration education provides graduates with integrative managerial capabilities that are valuable in digitally intensive contexts so as to enhance their competitiveness. It uses a conceptual research design that builds on an integrative literature review and analytic synthesis of contributions across disciplines, such as digital transformation, human capital development, and educational crucial fields. This analysis is framed using the triple-helix framework, which guides exploration of interactions between universities and industry public policy. The findings reveal three major insights. To start, competencies for competing in the digital economy reach far beyond technical abilities to include analytical reasoning skills, strategic thinking ability and adaptive capacity. Second, business administration education serves as an institutional mediator between technological change and organizational value. Third, in order for skill formation to work effectively, governance needs to be collective across educational, economic and regulatory systems. This paper contributes to the bridge between education, digital skills and competitiveness through proposing a theoretical framework and provides implications for curriculum design, institutional strategic choices as well as policy making.

Over the last decade, leadership research has been focused on challenges faced by high-performance organizations to ensure their sustainability when facing complexity, uncertainty or amplifying scrutiny. Elite football is one of the most observed performance oriented organization systems, where high-level competition together with time pressure, dispersed domain specific expertise and accountability mechanisms are highly visible. This study examines the translatability from elite football leadership principles to educational institutions not only as metaphorical comparisons, but rather structurally similar and demonstrably performance-based organizations. It has been situated at the intersection of literature on leadership, elite sports performance and educational management, drawing on insights from a diachronic and comparative reading of models of leadership in elite football specially transformational leadership, distributed leadership and high-performance culture. Our analysis identifies core leadership dimensions like and maps these systematically to educational leadership practices including decision making under sustained pressure, team cohesion, feedback and performance monitoring systems, resilience. Educational institutions can embrace a more coherent performance orientation, the authors contend, without compromising their normative and social missions. We contribute by highlighting a theoretically rooted cross-domain leadership framework but also, more importantly, that the transfer of leadership knowledge (specificities rather than generalities) between elite sport and education has not been systematically researched. Findings provide a foundation for implications related to educational leadership development, institutional governance, and policy design with limitations and future empirical research opportunities. This paper stands out to scholars, practitioners and policymakers engaging with the ways in which organizations can endure amidst continuous and high levels of pressure.