Abstract
The entrepreneurial ecosystem stream of research is relatively new, yet it has started to attract the attention of scholars across a range of disciplines including international business and international entrepreneurship. Review studies are needed to consolidate the research and to illustrate the status quo and present visions for research going forward. This study aims to do so by applying bibliometric process technique. The present study summarizes the key countries and institutions, source journals, scholars and publications, and key themes encompassing the domain of entrepreneurial ecosystem research up to 2019. The findings illustrate an exponential growth of research covering a wide array of disciplines and top journals, observe several influential scholars and their collaboration networks, and find that the studies remain distinctly practitioner focused. In addition, six themes within the research domain are identified. The multilevel analysis gives a comprehensive overview of the entrepreneurial ecosystem domain.
Highlights
Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) constitutes a new-found stream of studies explaining how this complex socioeconomic system supports entrepreneurial activities and value creation for the larger community
We reviewed the titles of the papers that matched our keyword searches; where necessary, we examined the abstracts and the introduction sections to narrow down the list of sources
Our results show that EE research has been conducted in 37 countries and 232 institutions
Summary
Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) constitutes a new-found stream of studies explaining how this complex socioeconomic system supports entrepreneurial activities and value creation for the larger community. Starting as an ecological metaphor (Moore, 1993) to explain the system-level complexities, the ecosystem concept has subsequently become an attractive framework to explain different system designs (Ritala & Almpanopoulou, 2017), influencing the creation of multiple research streams. They include entrepreneurial, knowledge, business, innovation and digital platform ecosystems, among others (Aarikka-Stenroos & Ritala, 2017; de Reuver et al, 2018; Hakala et al, 2020; Jacobides et al, 2018; Scaringella & Radziwon, 2018). The EE combines a multitude of research streams, making the present study relevant to provide a timely overview of EE research
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