A critical review of entrepreneurial ecosystems research: towards a future research agenda
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 17 March 2017
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in European Planning Studies
- Vol. 25 (6), 887-903
- https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2017.1299694
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
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