Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Regional Policy: A Sympathetic Critique

TLDR

Entrepreneurship policy is shifting from quantity to quality and toward an entrepreneurial economy, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem framework—emphasizing actors and productive context—has been promoted as a new approach, though its causal depth and evidence base remain limited. The study reviews entrepreneurial ecosystem literature, identifies its shortcomings, and offers a novel synthesis that maps how ecosystem framework and systemic conditions drive entrepreneurial activities and create new value. It introduces a framework that analyzes interactions among ecosystem elements and delineates a causal scheme linking systemic conditions to entrepreneurial outputs and value creation. The synthesis provides a more rigorous foundation for future research on entrepreneurial ecosystems and informs regional policy implications.

Abstract

Regional policies for entrepreneurship are currently going through a transition from increasing the quantity of entrepreneurship to increasing the quality of entrepreneurship. The next step will be the transition from entrepreneurship policy towards policy for an entrepreneurial economy. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach has been heralded as a new framework accommodating these transitions. This approach starts with the entrepreneurial actor, but emphasizes the context of productive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not only the output of the system, entrepreneurs are important players themselves in creating the ecosystem and keeping it healthy. This research briefing reviews the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature and its shortcomings, and provides a novel synthesis. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach speaks directly to practitioners, but its causal depth and evidence base is rather limited. This article provides a novel synthesis including a causal scheme of how the framework and systemic conditions of the ecosystem lead to particular entrepreneurial activities as output of the ecosystem and new value creation as outcome of the ecosystem. In addition it provides a framework for analysing the interactions between the elements within the ecosystem. This offers a much more rigorous and relevant starting point for subsequent studies into entrepreneurial ecosystems and the regional policy implications of these.