137In this section, I start with a description of the entrepreneurship industry in Sweden to illustrate how this industry was described by informants. Thereafter, I provide an empirical account of how actors in this industry perceived cultural ideals, their emergence, manifestations, and consequences.

4.1

The Entrepreneurship Industry in Sweden

In interviews, informants described the industry as fragmented, involving both public and private actors. P., for example, an entrepreneurship scholar and author of multiple reports about innovation policy support, described a system that involved participants at all different levels, from government to regional and private actors:

Policy decisions are made by the government. . .VINNOVA have a lot of responsibility, but

there are also other councils, like Formas, for example. And we have the semi-private

institutions as well, that finance activities too. We have, for example, Almi, a semi-public

organization. . .regional actors like Region Skåne. . . .And then we have the universities, that

are working with their own innovation units. . .innovation offices and technology transfer

offices. So even at the university level, it is fragmented with different organizations that are A. Brattström

138engaged in innovation. . .and then we have the industry that also finance a lot of innovation.

(P. innovation scholar) To illustrate the degree of fragmentation, Table 2 provides an overview of a subsample of the entrepreneurship industry in Sweden, listing public-funded actors in Skåne, southern Sweden. As illustrated in this table, this subcategory involves numerous actors (n ¼ 82)—even though it does not include private companies or