Women’s Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: A Review and Prospects

Abstract

Women’s entrepreneurship plays an increasingly important role in increasing the global employment rate and fostering the economic growth. Entrepreneurial ecosystem is an organism composed of a variety of actors and environmental support elements which can provide environmental support for the survival and development of female new businesses. Most of the extant literature on women’s entrepreneurship focuses on a single actor, lacking research on the interaction between female-owned enterprises and other actors. There is no lack of participation of female start-ups in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. At the same time, it can reflect how female start-ups create a business support environment through the interactions with other actors, thus helping them to construct competitive advantages.Based on the above, this paper draws on three major bodies of literature-women’s entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial ecosystem and women’s entrepreneurship from the perspective of entrepreneurial ecosystem. Then the interaction between women’s entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystem is explored, and the future directions of female entrepreneurship research from the perspective of entrepreneurial ecosystem are pointed out, so as to play a role in boosting future women’s entrepreneurship research. First of all, we search for the articles related to women’s entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial ecosystem and women’s entrepreneurship from the perspective of entrepreneurial ecosystem. Based on the articles on female entrepreneurship, the characteristics of female entrepreneurship are extracted from five aspects: entrepreneurial resource, entrepreneurial network, entrepreneurial opportunity, firm performance and entrepreneurial environment. According to the literature of entrepreneurial ecosystem, the theoretical background of entrepreneurial ecosystem is reviewed, and the definition, characteristics and research status of entrepreneurial ecosystem are clarified. In addition, by combing the literature on female entrepreneurship from the perspective of entrepreneurial ecosystem, the research mainly focuses on social network, institutional environment, proportion of female founders, reentry for female entrepreneurs, and so on. Then, the interactive relationship between female entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystem is examined. This paper systematically organizes the existing articles on women’s entrepreneurship, and plays a role in promoting the future research of women’s entrepreneurship from the perspective of entrepreneurial ecosystem.