PÉPITE as Institutional Mediator in Territorial Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: Knowledge-Based Capabilities, the Micro-Foundations of Sensing, and a Governance-Contrast Research Protocol

This paper presents a conceptual research protocol for peer review and community validation before field deployment. The research asks how the structural and relational characteristics of territorial entrepreneurial ecosystems condition the institutional mediation capabilities of the French PÉPITE scheme — Pôles Étudiants Pour l'Innovation, le Transfert et l'Entrepreneuriat — and how these capabilities translate ecosystem resources into student entrepreneurial agency. We introduce the concept of the institutional mediator: a meso-level actor whose sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities (Kaur, 2023; Mele et al., 2024) are co-produced by the territorial ecosystem in which it operates. To open the sensing black box, we propose that the Originating Ba (Nonaka & Konno, 1998) — the face-to-face interaction space between PÉPITE coordinators and territorial actors — is the primary mechanism through which tacit ecosystem knowledge becomes perceptible and actionable for the dispositif. The boundary between Originating Ba and Dialoguing Ba in practice is one of three design questions we submit to the EERS community. The research deploys a sequential mixed-methods design across three PÉPITE poles selected for maximum governance contrast: Pépite CréaJ IDF (distributed multi-tutelle consortium), Pépite Pays de la Loire Angers (bounded inter-university consortium), and Le PeeL Lorraine (mono-tutelle, consistently among France's most productive poles by student-entrepreneur numbers). This governance-contrast design tests whether mediation performance tracks ecosystem richness or dispositif structural simplicity. The paper closes with three design questions submitted to the EERS community for validation before fieldwork begins in October 2026.