Entrepreneurship and innovation in Africa: a resilience, institutional and informality conceptual convergence

Purpose This special issue (SI) puts into sharp focus prevailing conceptions of, and approaches to, research on African entrepreneurship and innovation. It signals a perceptual shift in research dominated by near-universal Western theories that are often singled out for their insensitivity to context. Accordingly, this SI draws upon a range of contextualised theoretical perspectives to illuminate Africa's entrepreneurial and innovation contexts, experiences and practices. It marks a milestone in research that has historically undervalued African entrepreneurship and innovation by pioneering scholarship that spotlights the issue of coloniality of knowledge. Design/methodology/approach Drawing upon a realist perspective, this SI attracted 69 submissions over a seven-month period from May to December 2025. To identify relevant articles, manuscripts submitted to the SI went through a rigorous double-blind review involving the editorial team and a dedicated pool of reviewers. The entire process culminated in the 16 quality articles included in this SI, focusing on African entrepreneurship and innovation. The articles are grouped under four core areas: resilience, institutions, informality and transformation, and they draw on multiple modes of design, methodology and approach. Findings The theoretical arguments that the SI presents describe powerful, self-organised institutions, entrepreneurial and innovative tendencies unconstrained by limited resources and resilient manoeuvres despite numerous business challenges characterising Africa's entrepreneurial contexts. Originality/value Articles in this SI adopt a contextualised approach to highlight the distinctiveness of African entrepreneurship, resilience, informality, innovation and its institutions. They describe how a confluence of cultural factors, societal norms and values embedded in many business and social institutions across the African continent dictates African entrepreneurship, characterised by informality, resilience and innovation. By highlighting this deep infusion of localised systems into social and business settings in Africa, these articles underscore the need to reconsider the use of universal theoretical paradigms that scholars tend to force-fit to study such complex contexts, without acknowledging these contexts or the distinct behaviours they induce.