HIGHER-ORDER RESTART BY SERIAL ENTREPRENEURS

Prior venture failure is widely recognized as a defining event in serial entrepreneurship, yet the process through which the entrepreneurial ecosystem shapes restart trajectories after failure remains theoretically underspecified. Existing scholarship has examined ecosystems as structural contexts for venture creation and has studied failure as an individual-level learning and recovery process, but these two streams have not been theoretically integrated around the transition from failure to restart. This study addresses that gap by examining how Pakistan's entrepreneurial ecosystem acts as a post-failure catalyst that filters restart options, redirects support dependence, activates adaptive reconfiguration, and shapes whether the subsequent venture achieves a higher-order, more sustainable form. Grounded theory analysis of semi-structured interviews with seven purposively selected ecosystem experts — representing institutional domains spanning incubation, small and medium enterprise policy, banking, entrepreneurship education, legal consulting, women's entrepreneurship, and serial entrepreneurship practice — generated 176 open codes, 22 axial categories, and five theoretical propositions organized under a dual ecosystem catalyst model. The findings reveal that Pakistan's ecosystem operates through two structurally distinct layers: a thin formal layer reaching approximately 15 to 20 percent of entrepreneurs, and a dense informal layer sustaining the majority through religious networks, family capital, and community trust mechanisms. After prior venture failure, these layers interact as a catalytic structure that does not merely constrain or support restart but actively filters, redirects, and transforms it. Serial entrepreneurs who navigate dual ecosystem layers through compensatory micro-ecosystem assembly and selective reconfiguration of informal support achieve higher-order restart into ventures that are more adaptive, more network-grounded, and structurally more sustainable than their failed predecessors. The study contributes a process-theoretic extension of the Institution-Based View and of entrepreneurial ecosystem theory by theorizing the dual ecosystem as an active post-failure catalyst mechanism rather than a passive environmental backdrop.