More than two decades ago, Lounsbury and Glynn proposed that entrepreneurship is about creating culture with stories; that is, telling stories that mediate resources and legitimize new business identities.² “Cultural entrepreneurship” is, in their definition, the process by which narrative connects resource stocks (e.g., skills, networks, etc.) with the subsequent acquisition of capital and status. In this essay, we adapt a systems-based view to the entrepreneurial prototype, a protagonist of a story who shapes its environment at different levels. Following Houde and Hill, who argue that prototypes exceed their material form by incorporating multiple dimensions of meaning,³ and Lim et al., who frame prototypes as filters and manifestations that materialize ideas,⁴ we propose that the prototype, which has a visual nature of its own, may well be seen as the center of a narrative ecology.

If we accept Suchman’s classic premise of legitimacy as an essential resource, one that is built through time and that has a pragmatic, moral, and cognitive dimension, then what counts is not just “what a company says” but who says it, where it circulates, and how the message is recombined inside an environment.⁵ This is the gateway to an ecological vision. The official narrative is a node; legitimacy arises from the circulation and recombination of everything that happens within an ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship alone does not confer legitimacy to a project in a market. Legitimacy emerges, instead, from a metanarrative, in the broad sense of Lyotard et al., composed of all the stories that circulate and recombine visually and transmedially: press, networks, competitors, customers, fandoms, memes, public demos, reviews, forums, leaks, and counter-narratives.⁶ Using the concept of spreadability,⁷ this narrative ecology determines which version “remains” in the public mind and, therefore, which companies are legitimized (or not) by their key audiences.

Departing from Dunlop and Wilkinson Westberg, narrative ecology,⁸ a concept based on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory,⁹ appears as a context and map of stories that are produced and interconnected at multiple levels of an environment. In this sense, entrepreneurial narratives are composed of stories that shape an environment while being shaped by it at the same time. They are woven into a “coherent and compelling plot” that transcends the personal and reaches systems where further personal and even group stories interact.¹⁰

Bronfenbrenner’s original approach, known as ecological systems theory, implied five concentric layers or systems that include a micro, meso, exo, macro, and chronosystem (see figure 1). One could see them as different layers of an environment that shapes the individual. Thus, the latter could be profoundly understood within those layers. Dunlop and Wilkinson Westberg apply this theory to propose a narrative ecology, one that is constituted by stories that appear at different distances to the center (from the autobiography over to a broader cultural tale that shapes the individual).¹¹

Relevant to their approach is the issue of continuity (i.e., the idea that there is a “sameness” in the self that connects past, present, and future through a narrative). For them, the continuity of the self is connected to cultural continuity, where the latter is a “necessary precursor” of the former.¹² One could picture an entrepreneur in the creative industries that sees themselves connected to their culture through their own creations. These may be inspired in the stories that their surroundings offer, thereby constructing their own identity as cultural entrepreneur. Considering the role of film as a source of numerable personal stories and even as reflections of metanarratives, the self may understand its identity as being coshaped by what Dunlop and Wilkinson Westberg consider a “shared framework.”¹³

In our thought experiment, we suggest seeing the prototype as a potential center of a system that can act as the individual does in the original model of Bronfenbrenner. However, the role of stories, as in a narrative ecology, is essential, even if we look at the center of the system as an individual or as a prototype, as the latter itself tells stories and is shaped by them. In line with the model, the prototype itself can hardly be understood without its layers of context (i.e., without its ecology). As presented in table 1, the macrosystem would include ideologies that frame the prototype; the exosystem would involve institutions, press, regulators, platforms; the mesosystem would be shaped by connections between communities and forums where the prototype is discussed; the microsystem would involve teams, expert users, and close testing; and the center— the prototype itself along its public biography or timeframe—would be influenced by the chronosystem that involves its development through time.

Based on this parallel, we propose a narrative ecology of the entrepreneurial prototype, which suggests that the prototype lives in a concentric set of systems that shape it while it projects stories that coshape its environment, even altering it based on how influential it is. One can think of AI-based chatbots that materialized at a certain point as a prototype that told a story, one that became so influential with its functionality that it was capable of coshaping the environment at different levels. To exemplify what we mean by this narrative ecology, we can characterize the systems as follows:

The narrative origin (Prototype): The artifact (physical or visual) and its first history of use (key gesture, context of use, “how it works” diagram, before/after comparison).

This adaptation not only describes where the prototype’s stories reside but also how they change meaning when they move between levels and how that mobility, amplified by visual storytelling and transmedia expansion, ends up defining a start-up’s legitimacy in the public sphere.

A question that arises here is: What about the entrepreneur (i.e., the storyteller) of the prototype? In our line of thought, both the prototype and the entrepreneur tell a story and have a sense of continuity that shapes their evolving identity.¹⁴ This implies that they overlap, as if two concentric systems (that of the prototype and that of the entrepreneur) were placed one above the other, linked by a narrative.

Narrative ecologies help us typify the narratives that emerge in the ecological model. Dunlop et al. identify four narrative families that cut across the system’s levels: agency, communion, redemption, and contamination.¹⁵ By intersecting this typology with the entrepreneurial principle of the prototype as protagonist, we can read and govern the same plots but shift the focus from the individual to the artifact’s public biography (what the prototype does, shows, and convenes).

Redemption is the third type of story: an arc of progress that moves from negative to positive. In affective terms, it narrates improvement, repair, healing, learning, and salvation—from stumbling to overcoming, from suffering to well-being, from doubt to confidence. This same arc can be interpreted and displayed in the public life of a prototype when the object offers visible evidence that it has learned from its mistake and changed its performance (see figure 4).

Finally, contamination is the reverse of redemption, a regressive arc where the emotional trajectory goes from positive to negative or from bad to worse, corrupting the original meaning. These are stories that begin with promise (success, hope, trust) and end in disappointment, loss, or reputational damage; or they begin in crisis and deepen the deterioration.

In the world of prototypes, this arc appears when public evidence undermines the initial promise and each new milestone increases the adverse interpretation (see figure 5).

From a systems view that incorporates the role of story and that of the entrepreneurial prototype, one could assert that the prototype is the originator that is shaped by its environment. Whether it becomes legitimate or not is a question of success in a market. Legitimacy does not emanate from the entrepreneur’s original story but from the dynamic sum of all the levels that act on its origin (the prototype). Any variation in a subsystem reframes what others perceive and, over time (chrono), can establish or modify the dominant narrative.

The prototype is the entrepreneur’s new creation: Born with the intentions and assumptions of its creator, it soon takes on a public life of its own. As soon as it appears on the scene, it begins to be interpreted, tested, and narrated by others; its trajectory is driven by public opinion as it navigates the narrative ecology.

If we accept that stories can have a person or an artifact as their protagonist, then the social identity of both comes not from the physical object itself but from the narratives that surround it. And this fabric is not under the control of the creator—it is the uncontrollable and distributed result of how stories combine, collide, and sediment as they progress through the different stages (micro, meso, exo, macro, and chrono) of their ecology. In short, the prototype may emerge from the will of an individual, but its meaning and legitimacy are decided externally, in the collective conversation that adopts, discusses, or refutes it.