Original title: Toward an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Research Program
An entrepreneurial ecosystemA concept for studying the connected conditions and relationships surrounding entrepreneurship. is a way to think about the connected conditions around entrepreneurship. Researchers have drawn on many earlier ideas to study these ecosystems, but the concept is still not fully explained. In particular, the processes that make ecosystems change over time are unclear. This paper reviews recent work and proposes a research program that brings together ideas from different fields.
Imagine a neighborhood where people share tools, trade advice, and help one another run small businesses. It can be hard to tell which connections actually cause the neighborhood to change, rather than simply appearing alongside that change. In this paper, the neighborhood stands for an entrepreneurial ecosystem, and the unclear effects of its connections are the mechanisms researchers are trying to understand. The proposed research program is a way for people from different fields to study those changes together.
People who study or support entrepreneurship need to understand how ecosystems change, not just use the label. This paper organizes existing research and proposes a shared research program to help clarify those changes.
The abstract does not report specific mechanisms, findings, or evidence about how well the proposed research program works. It describes a synthesis of recent scholarship and a proposed agenda, not a demonstrated solution to the gaps it identifies.
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Toward an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Research Program — Bernd Wurth, Erik Stam, Ben Spigel — Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice — doi:10.1177/1042258721998948
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.