From Brain Drain to Ecosystem Gain: How Diaspora Knowledge Networks Shape Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Entrepreneurial ecosystem theory has often been operationalised through territorially bounded elements: talent, finance, knowledge, networks, leadership and related institutional conditions are typically measured within a region. Diaspora scholarship complicates that boundary by showing that relevant resources can remain accessible after skilled people leave, yet it has rarely specified which ecosystem elements are affected, how, or why conversion differs across origin economies. The resulting literature contains apparently contradictory findings: patent-citation evidence indicates that innovator emigration can reduce domestic access to co-located knowledge, while firm- and country-level studies report circumstances in which diaspora ties support opportunity-driven entrepreneurship. This article treats that divergence as a theoretical problem to be explained, not as noise. The article develops the Conditional Absorption Model of Diaspora Knowledge Networks (CAM-DKN), a theoretical framework whose central proposition is that resources located outside an ecosystem’s territory can nevertheless function as ecosystem elements when they are conditionally available to its actors—that is, reliably accessible, matchable and usable through trusted relationships and intermediation. On this view, a DKN is not simply an international connection but a potentially extra-territorial ecosystem element. The framework specifies three transfer mechanisms—brokered search, institutional substitution and signalling, and normative standard-setting—and three origin-side conditions proposed to govern conversion: domestic absorptive capacity, intermediation architecture and credible reciprocity. It is elaborated through a structured synthesis of thirteen documented cases, selected for analytical variation rather than representativeness, from which four provisional configurations are derived: Latent Reservoir, Extractive Channel, Brokered Bridge and Circulatory Ecosystem. The cross-case record is consistent with conditional and element-specific DKN effects; these patterns are analytical interpretations of published evidence, not statistical estimates or evidence of prevalence. The article contributes a boundary extension of ecosystem-elements theory based on conditional availability, a conditional explanation of heterogeneous brain-drain and brain-gain findings, a mechanism-specific account of DKN-to-ecosystem transfer, a provisional configuration typology, and a proposed measurement architecture comprising a knowledge-weighted diaspora exposure construct and a diaspora-specific reciprocity coding instrument. No new estimation is reported; the propositions, the conjunctural specification, the typology and both measures are offered for validation, and the article specifies the alternative models, identification challenges and falsification conditions against which they should be evaluated.