Regional policies for entrepreneurship are currently going through a transition from increasing the quantity of entrepreneurship to increasing the quality of entrepreneurship. The next step will be the transition from entrepreneurship policy towards policy for an entrepreneurial economy. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach has been heralded as a new framework accommodating these transitions. This approach starts with the entrepreneurial actor, but emphasizes the context of productive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not only the output of the system, entrepreneurs are important players themselves in creating the ecosystem and keeping it healthy. This research briefing reviews the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature and its shortcomings, and provides a novel synthesis. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach speaks directly to practitioners, but its causal depth and evidence base is rather limited. This article provides a novel synthesis including a causal scheme of how the framework and systemic conditions of the ecosystem lead to particular entrepreneurial activities as output of the ecosystem and new value creation as outcome of the ecosystem. In addition it provides a framework for analysing the interactions between the elements within the ecosystem. This offers a much more rigorous and relevant starting point for subsequent studies into entrepreneurial ecosystems and the regional policy implications of these.

In its most abstract sense, an ecosystem is a biotic community, encompassing its physical environment, and all the interactions possible in the complex of living and nonliving components. Economics has always been about systems that explain differential output and outcomes. However, economics has generally ignored the role of entrepreneurship in economic systems, just as entrepreneurship studies have largely overlooked the role of systems in explaining the prevalence and performance of entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach has the promise to correct these shortcomings. Its two dominant lineages are the regional development literature and the strategy literature. Both lineages share common roots in ecological systems thinking, providing fresh insights into the interdependence of actors in a particular community to create new value. But studies of both regional development and strategic management have largely ignored the role of entrepreneurs in new value creation. In this paper, we will outline contributions to the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach and conclude with a promising new line of research to our understanding of the emergence, growth, and context of start-ups that have achieved great impact by developing new platforms.

There is a growing interest in ecosystems as an approach for understanding the context of entrepreneurship at the macro level of an organizational community. It consists of all the interdependent actors and factors that enable and constrain entrepreneurship within a particular territory. Although growing in popularity, the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept remains loosely defined and measured. This paper shows the value of taking a systems view of the context of entrepreneurship: understanding entrepreneurial economies from a systems perspective. We use a systems framework for studying entrepreneurial ecosystems, develop a measurement instrument of its elements, and use this to compose an entrepreneurial ecosystem index to examine the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Netherlands. We find that the prevalence of high-growth firms in a region is strongly related to the quality of its entrepreneurial ecosystem. Strong interrelationships among the ecosystem elements reveal their interdependence and need for a systems perspective.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have become a prominent concept, yet in its current state, the concept itself represents a paradox. While it draws on a rich intellectual history and provides an opportunity to synthesize different strands of research, it is also under-theorized and the mechanisms that govern ecosystem evolution are not well understood. This paper takes stock of recent advancements in ecosystem scholarship and synthesizes the empirical reality of the causal mechanisms. We use these dynamics to position ecosystems in a broader context, within and beyond the domain of entrepreneurship research, and propose a transdisciplinary research program for ecosystem research and practice.

Institutions have a decisive impact on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurship. To date, the impact of institutions on (productive) entrepreneurship and the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth have largely been investigated in isolation. In this paper, we bring together institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic growth using a parsimonious growth model in a 3SLS specification. In our first stage, we regress multiple measures of entrepreneurial activity on institutional proxies that are known to correlate with more productive forms of entrepreneurial activity. Using the fitted values of this first-stage regression as our proxy for productive entrepreneurship, we can then estimate a panel growth regression following Islam (1995) in a second stage. The third stage then optimizes the estimation of the two equations simultaneously. Our results show that productive entrepreneurship contributes to economic growth. In our set of proxies for institutional quality, financial stability, small government, and perceived start-up skills are the most important predictors of such productive entrepreneurship.

This paper reviews and discusses the emergent entrepreneurial ecosystem approach. Entrepreneurial ecosystems are defined as a set of interdependent actors and factors coordinated in such a way that they enable productive entrepreneurship within a particular territory. The purpose of this paper is to critically investigate the emerging literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems. Current work on ecosystems is underdeveloped, focusing more on superficial generalizations based on successful case studies such as Silicon Valley or Boulder, Colorado rather than on rigorous social science research. The paper provides a review of the multiple definitions of ecosystems found within the literature, and discusses the relationships between ecosystems and allied concepts such as industrial districts, clusters, and innovation systems. The paper concludes by discussing an integrative model that connects the functional attributes of entrepreneurial ecosystems (including framework conditions and systemic conditions) with entrepreneurial outputs and welfare outcomes. The framework conditions consist of the social (informal and formal institutions) and physical conditions enabling or constraining human interaction. Systemic conditions are the heart of the ecosystem and include networks of entrepreneurs, leadership, finance, talent, knowledge, and support services.

New firms, Innovation, R&D, Firm growth, Alliances, Product development, D21, L23, L25, L26, M13,

Entrepreneurship is an important process in regional economic development. Especially the growth of new firms is of major significance to the commercialization of new ideas and employment growth. These growing new firms are transforming structurally like caterpillars turning into butterflies. However, like butterflies, they are at risk of leaving their region of origin for better places. This article analyzes how and why the spatial organization of firms develops subsequent to their start‐up. A new conceptual framework and an empirical study of the life course of entrepreneurial firms are used to construct a theory on the firms' locational behavior that explains that behavior as the outcome of a process of initiatives by entrepreneurs, enabled and constrained by resources, capabilities, and relations with stakeholders within and outside the firms. The study shows that entrepreneurs decide whether to move their firms outside their region of origin for different reasons in distinct phases of the firms' life course. Being embedded in social networks, for example, is an important constraint on locational behavior during the early life course of a firm, but over time it becomes less important, and other mechanisms, such as sunk costs, increasingly determine a firm's locational behavior. The development of spatial organization is also of major importance: when a multilocational spatial organization has been realized, it is much easier to move the headquarters to another region. The spatial organization of entrepreneurial firms co‐evolves with the accumulation of the firms' capabilities. A developmental approach that incorporates evolutionary mechanisms and recognizes human agency provides new insights into the age‐old study of the location of firms.