A critical review of entrepreneurial ecosystems research: towards a future research agenda

ABSTRACT

The entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) literature has attracted much attention, especially in policy circles. However, the concept suffers from a number of shortcomings: (1) it lacks a clear analytical framework that makes explicit what is cause and what is effect in an EE; (2) while being a systemic concept, the EE has not yet fully exploited insights from network theory, and it is not always clear in what way the proposed elements are connected in an EE; (3) it remains a challenge what institutions (and at what spatial scale) impact on the structure and performance of EE; (4) studies have often focused on the EE in single regions or clusters, but lack a comparative and multi-scalar perspective and (5) the EE literature tends to provide a static framework taking a snapshot of EE without considering systematically their evolution over time. For each of these shortcomings, we make a number of suggestions to take up in future research on EE.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurial ecosystem
• entrepreneurial system
• networks
• entrepreneurship
• clusters

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Auerswald (2015) suggested to map the ecosystem by for example, creating a graph with actors (the nodes), their interactions (edges) and revealing their roles and relationships by type, direction and magnitude.