Entrepreneurial Finance Innovation and Market Development in Nigeria: Towards a Theory of Financial System Entrepreneurship

This dissertation develops an original theory of financial system entrepreneurship, examining how entrepreneurial actors are innovating the architecture of Nigeria's financial system itself, creating new financial instruments, institutions, platforms, and market infrastructure that expand the financial resources available to enterprise development beyond the limits of the existing banking system. Nigeria's financial system has historically been inadequate for enterprise financing needs, with commercial banks focused on large corporate clients, formal venture capital extremely limited, and alternative finance mechanisms underdeveloped. The dissertation argues that entrepreneurs who innovate financial system components rather than merely using existing financial resources represent a distinctive and theoretically underdeveloped category of enterprise actor whose role is critical to financial ecosystem development. The study employs a longitudinal process theory design, tracing the innovation trajectories of 15 financial system entrepreneurs across venture capital, impact investing, fintech lending, capital market infrastructure, and alternative finance platform sectors in Lagos and Abuja over a five-year period. Data were collected through 60 in-depth interviews, financial market regulatory filings analysis, and a secondary survey of 80 enterprises that used innovations created by the studied financial entrepreneurs. Theoretical contribution is the Financial System Entrepreneurship model, which extends institutional entrepreneurship theory through the concept of financial architecture creation, the deliberate redesign of the rules, instruments, and intermediaries through which capital allocates to enterprise. The model distinguishes incremental system improvement from generative system creation as two distinct entrepreneurial modes with different capability requirements. Keywords: financial system entrepreneurship, financial innovation, venture capital, Nigeria, institutional entrepreneurship.