“What a dignified, severe city, wonderful clarity, autumn colors, an exquisite sense of well-being that is common to all things” – F. Nietzsche on Turin, Italy

The purpose of this paper is to extend understanding of place as a key dynamic of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) aiming to deliver social impact. Research on EEs dedicated to social impact creation is relatively limited, with most of the work relegating social impact to an implicit output of EE actors and factors. The engines enabling some EEs to rejuvenate places are not necessarily portable from place to place. This paper broadens understanding of EEs through examining the role of place in the “pursuit of positive change”. Place provides an emotional charge for entrepreneurial agents identifying and addressing local issues, giving legitimacy to their socially innovative and entrepreneurial endeavours. Place shapes how and why entrepreneurs choose to act and how they live.

This paper is interested in how place-based emotions and entrepreneurial activities interact within the socio-spatial boundaries of EEs. Given the interconnection of global and local realms in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and corresponding agenda (UN, 2015), it is timely to examine why and how place matters in transforming our world. We chose to explore the EE evolving in Turin, Italy, a place with a rich, dichotomous past split between the industrial and social economy. Rather than concentrating on how certain individuals constructed ecosystems seemingly from scratch, through strategic decision-making, this study concentrates on the creation of social value in the present-day that is endogenously linked to historical legacies of social institutions. We pose two interrelated research questions: how does place influence EE support for social impact? And secondly, how can place-based emotions rooted in the past shape the EE’s present and future evolution? To address these questions, we adopted a qualitative approach, involving interviews as well as participatory and non-participatory observations during a five-week period in the empirical setting. The findings contribute to uncovering the place dynamics playing out in Turin, which we summarise as three place-based practices: i) recalling past legacies of social impact; ii) recognising present socioenvironmental challenges; and iii) rethinking the social economy to overcome challenges to ultimately improve the place. We see temporal dimensions of place-based emotions being conveyed, with actors seeking to reconcile the past, present and future simultaneously. The findings also show that place can encompass different boundaries and relationships depending on the social issue at hand: actors understand Turin in terms of the Piedmont region, as well as at Italian and European Union or global levels. We contribute to the literature on EEs by identifying the role of social sector organisations in encapsulating place-based emotions into social impact initiatives, offering a supportive nest to drive innovation.