Entrepreneurship Policy Agenda in the European Union: A Text Mining Perspective

Abstract

Abstract This study analyzes the learning curve in the emergence and development of an entrepreneurship policy in the European Union (EU) during the period 1990–2016 by identifying the key topics in the policy agenda setting and their evolution over time within a corpus of 576 selected policy‐making documents. To this end, the study uses a combination of text mining techniques, cluster analysis, and qualitative assessment, which illustrate the possibilities of these tools to learn about the evolution of the policy cycle in a particular domain. The results from the analysis display three main stages, each of which have two substages. During the initial period, which lasted up until the late 1990s, labelled (i) latent EU entrepreneurship policy , there were hardly any specific entrepreneurship policy initiatives and only some general enterprise‐fostering policies at the EU level which included, tangentially, SMEs and entrepreneurs. In the (ii) emergent EU entrepreneurship policy stage, which can be traced from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, saw the initial steps of an entrepreneurship policy with a main focus on diagnosis of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and some measures of support, mainly to SMEs. The third and last period to date, which began in the 2010s is a (iii) new normal for EU entrepreneurship policy, which is a more targeted stage aimed at promoting not only the quantity but also quality of business ventures. Overall, this study provides a complete overview of the EU entrepreneurship policy evolution and concludes with a granular proposal for its continued development, while identifying main themes and foundational concepts, establishing patterns, and finding temporal and contextual relations within the EU policy cycle.