Entrepreneurial ecosystems

Abstract

While earlier literature on entrepreneurship mostly concentrated on the behavior of individuals or firms, scholarship has now been expanded towards the study of entrepreneurial activity in broader contexts including regional, temporal and social settings. The creation, discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is nowadays considered a result of attitudes and opportunities given in the environment in which individuals work and live, thus giving rise to the term entrepreneurial ecosystem. This short paper provides a theoretical framework to structure important literature in this field and summarizes the results of a recent empirical study which used this framework to indicate the heterogeneity between regional entrepreneurial ecosystems, on the one hand, and the persistence of a small number of factors across successful ecosystems, on the other.