Digitalisation and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems as Drivers of Energy Start-Ups: Evidence from Cross-Country Panel Data

The accelerating energy transition and digital transformation have increased the importance of understanding the drivers of energy-related entrepreneurship and investment across countries. This study aims to investigate how digitalisation and entrepreneurial ecosystem development influence the number and funding of energy-related start-ups, with particular attention to stage-specific effects, lagged dynamics, and non-linear relationships in a cross-country panel setting. The analysis is based on panel data from the European Commission (DESI), the International Energy Agency, and StartupBlink, covering 25 countries (2017–2022) and a global sample (2019–2023), and is estimated using Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood models with fixed effects, lagged variables, and non-linear specifications in R. The findings show that digitalisation has a limited, selective relationship with energy-related entrepreneurship, whereas entrepreneurial ecosystem development plays a more consistent role. Digital connectivity is associated mainly with improved early-stage funding conditions, whereas broader digitalisation indicators do not systematically explain start-up formation. Stronger entrepreneurial ecosystems are linked to both higher green start-up activity and a shift in investment from early-stage ventures to more mature digital energy firms. The non-linear results further suggest diminishing returns to ecosystem development in later-stage green funding, indicating potential saturation effects in highly developed ecosystems. These findings suggest that policies aimed at accelerating sustainable energy entrepreneurship should go beyond general digitalisation strategies and focus more directly on strengthening inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystems, improving access to finance across the start-up lifecycle, and preventing excessive investment concentration in already mature ventures.