Although the literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems has raised an increasing conceptual interest in studying entrepreneurial support organizations, the outcomes they provide for the involved organizations and territories remain understudied. The primary objective of this study is to deepen the research dealing with entrepreneurial support organization outcomes vis-à-vis the increasing institutional pressure they undergo towards entrepreneurial ecosystem sustainable development. To do so, we rely on an abductive qualitative study based on 45 semi-structured interviews, that we analyze by employing a systematic analysis conducted through the NVivo software. Our results show that the motivations of both policy makers and entrepreneurial support organization sponsors cause strategic misalignments among entrepreneurial support organizations, leading to a slowdown in entrepreneurial ecosystem sustainable development. From a theoretical perspective, we contribute to the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature by highlighting the crucial role of entrepreneurial support organizations in entrepreneurial ecosystem sustainable development. More precisely, we show that entrepreneurial support organizations face a double institutional pressure on their outcomes which generates unachievable outcomes towards entrepreneurial ecosystem development. From an empirical perspective, this implies that it would be relevant for entrepreneurial support organizations and their sponsors to set strategic development programs according to the type of their competitive scopes to avoid inefficient efforts towards entrepreneurial ecosystem sustainable development.
