Chair: Dr Daniel Prokop
Track title: Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
Track overview
Entrepreneurial ecosystems have become a major area of development in entrepreneurship research, shifting attention beyond the individual entrepreneur and venture to the wider contextual conditions in which entrepreneurial activity emerges and develops. This is now a dynamic and fast-evolving field of study that continues to generate substantial conceptual and empirical debate.
There remains considerable scope for further research on entrepreneurial ecosystems, including how they operate in less developed localities, how their boundaries are defined, how they connect across places, how they are structured within and between localities, and how they can generate positive outputs and outcomes. There is also a continuing need for clearer conceptualisation and stronger theoretical development in this field.
Aims and objectives
This track aims:
-
To advance understanding of the structure, configuration and functioning of entrepreneurial ecosystems
-
To identify which configurations and compositions of entrepreneurial ecosystems generate positive entrepreneurial outputs and outcomes
-
To contribute to knowledge on different types of entrepreneurial ecosystems, including those in peripheral places, resource-constrained settings, and more developed economies
-
To examine the spatial organisation of entrepreneurial ecosystems, including boundaries, interconnections and cross-ecosystem relationships
-
To explore how entrepreneurial ecosystems stimulate and support different forms of entrepreneurship, such as international entrepreneurship, disabled entrepreneurship and technological entrepreneurship
-
To inform policymakers on how to support the development of successful entrepreneurial ecosystems that generate sustainable entrepreneurial activity and local economic development
These aims will be pursued through contributions that include:
-
Research that synthesises theoretical developments, offers critical insight, and advances the conceptualisation of entrepreneurial ecosystems
-
Empirical work using quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods to examine the structure, configuration, functioning, composition and spatial organisation of entrepreneurial ecosystems
-
Empirical research that contributes contextual explanations to different subfields of entrepreneurship, including international entrepreneurship, technological entrepreneurship and disabled entrepreneurship
-
Empirical studies drawing on distinctive cases that offer wider theoretical insight, such as peripheral economies, small towns and entrepreneurial ecosystems in the Global South
-
Policy-oriented research that identifies context-sensitive approaches suited to specific local conditions, rather than relying on generic best-practice models