Abstract
Tourism-dependent Mediterranean economies face a structural dilemma. The volume-based growth that built their prosperity now reproduces seasonality, spatial concentration and stagnant value per visitor, while environmental and housing pressures accumulate in the most exposed destinations. This study asks whether startup ecosystems can operate as mechanisms of sustainable tourism value creation, combining a conceptual framework, an analytical reading of the Greek policy architecture anchored in the Elevate Greece registry and the Startup Visa, and exploratory evidence from a structured survey of 76 Greek startups. Categorical associations were assessed with χ2 and Fisher exact tests accompanied by Cramér’s V, ordinal relations with Spearman correlations and rank based comparisons, and an exploratory logistic model estimated the correlates of high perceived tourism applicability. Perceived applicability to tourism proved remarkably widespread, reaching 77.6% of ventures and extending well beyond firms declared in tourism related sectors, while access to finance, bureaucracy and marketing emerged as the dominant barriers and own capital dominated funding structures. The findings characterize the ecosystem as a broad reservoir of latent tourism relevance constrained by capital and coordination, and they position ecosystem policy as a complement to (destination) governance in Mediterranean sustainability transitions.
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