From Financial Vulnerability to Entrepreneurial Agency: A Community-Based Ecosystem Model of Menara IBU

Universities are increasingly expected to develop students not only as future employees but also as entrepreneurial actors who can recognise opportunities, mobilise resources, create value, and respond to community problems. This study examines the emergence of Menara IBU (Inkubator Bisnis dan Usaha; Business and Enterprise Incubator) from a sequence of educational, creative-industry, scouting, cooperative, media, and community-development initiatives within Muhammadiyah networks in Indonesia. The study employs a qualitative reflexive case-study design informed by organizational autoethnography. The empirical trajectory began with KUKEJAR, a term that emerged from a 2021 university senate discussion concerning students with tuition-payment arrears. Rather than treating the problem solely as an administrative issue, the experience prompted a reframing of students as potential value creators. Subsequent initiatives—including student creative-industry activities, Kafepandu, Radio IBUPANDU, TV IBU, B’Scout, cooperative activities, and community-based projects—are analysed as interconnected entrepreneurial experiments. The findings identify five mechanisms through which the ecosystem emerged: problem reframing, entrepreneurial agency formation, network mobilisation, creative-to-market experimentation, and ecosystem consolidation. The study proposes Menara IBU as a community-based entrepreneurial ecosystem in which student talent, social capital, creative production, media, enterprise infrastructure, and markets are connected through an incubation logic. The article contributes to entrepreneurship research by showing how an entrepreneurial ecosystem may emerge from grassroots institutional learning and community networks rather than from a formally designed incubator alone. Practically, the model offers a framework for universities and community organisations seeking to integrate entrepreneurship education, social innovation, and sustainable value creation.