Exploring the Role of Culture in European Entrepreneurial Success: Qualitative Insights and Strategic Recommendations for Coalition Capital

Culture and entrepreneurship are complex and interrelated social concepts. The presence of disparities in entrepreneurial success among European Union nations, despite the existence of formal equality, requires a reconsideration of the relationship between culture and entrepreneurship in terms of “coalition capital” across the EU’s countries and companies. Therefore, this paper aims to gain insights about capital coalitions and co-working relationships between economic agents from different EU countries by comparing Hofstede’s cultural dimensions with the challenging task of evaluating overall entrepreneurial performance using ten conclusive indicators from the European Commission’s SME Scoreboard 2020. By using the cluster analysis - Hierarchical Clustering offered by the R-package, along with data on cultural dimensions that shape social behavior and statistics on the entrepreneurial success of small and medium-sized enterprises, several intriguing clusters of European Union nations have been found that show culture significantly groups countries more strongly than entrepreneurial performance, with smaller cluster sizes within the entrepreneurial correlation structure. Such insights facilitate the formulation of qualitative recommendations for entrepreneurs and public policy stakeholders and may be used to develop innovative public policies and to provide more objective guidance for fostering collaborative efforts among companies.