Abstract
The recent widespread interest of policy in entrepreneurial ecosystems has been complemented by a burgeoning academic research output. This research to date may be broadly categorized as focusing on place, actors, governance, and evolution. Of these groupings, evolutionary processes have been paid least attention despite their centrality to a dynamic ecosystem phenomenon that evolves from an origin through processes of growth, adaptation, and resilience. To redress this imbalance, we frame a future research agenda on evolutionary processes of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Foremost amongst these are the competing lens for the evolutionary processes, the appropriate and evolving geographic scope and boundaries of the ecosystem, and the evolving visible or invisible modes of governance. Methodologically, we call for greater use of longitudinal studies of such evolutionary processes.
Highlights
Successful local economies continuously refine and reshape their knowledge base and technological boundaries to preserve their competitiveness over time (Buciuni & Pisano, 2018)
Foremost amongst these are the appropriate and evolving boundaries of the ecosystem, the internal and external sources of new knowledge and the actors blending them with the existing knowledge base, and whether the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s evolution is guided by the visible hand of Government or is it less visibly anchored by large corporations, often MNEs, or institutions such as local universities
Building on the work of Markusen (1996) on the plurality of industrial districts, and more recently, that of Buciuni and Pisano (2021) on the variety of architectures in global value chains (GVCs), we call for future research that can examine the existence of different models of entrepreneurial ecosystems
Summary
Successful local economies continuously refine and reshape their knowledge base and technological boundaries to preserve their competitiveness over time (Buciuni & Pisano, 2018) This has emerged as an essential condition for their future prosperity and longterm sustainability. We suggest in this paper that a number of crucial evolutionary aspects remain unresolved for entrepreneurial ecosystems Foremost amongst these are the appropriate and evolving boundaries of the ecosystem, the internal and external sources of new knowledge and the actors blending them with the existing knowledge base, and whether the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s evolution is guided by the visible hand of Government or is it less visibly anchored by large corporations, often MNEs, or institutions such as local universities. The final section presents a discussion and some early conclusions
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