Contemporary innovative and growth oriented entrepreneurs are no longer primarily bound by their local operational context. They do not necessarily pursue resources locally, nor serve local markets. In contrast, they acquire and manage their resources, value chains, stakeholder relations, and access multiple markets across overlapping scales and within multiple spatial contexts, facilitated by field-level institutional structures. In so doing, they exercise consequential institutional change agency. Furthermore, entrepreneurs and other organizations within the related institutional field undertake deliberate exportation of the very institutional constructs they deem beneficial. Thus the entrepreneurs mobilize global networks of stakeholders and reference groups under the umbrella of institutional field. These sourcing activities become globally and publicly communicated within innovative communities. This process mediates influences across scales, which results in pressure for local institutional environments to adapt.

Thus, while globalization is often associated with large corporations, today’s global economy hardly remains their prerogative. The born-global entrepreneur is bending the rules. Research on this phenomenon is still only emerging to date. By a qualitative analysis on the imported and exported Finnish startup-scene, and its most prominent artefact Slush-convention, this paper proposes a framework by which to tackle this research gap and presents it as a contribution to institutional economic geography and institutional fields. The gist lies in the fact that while the entrepreneur’s political power is very limited, institutional change is imposed in a way similar to cultural influence. The pressure draws on narratives of success and the aggregate effect of their followers.