Introduction to Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Meet Innovation Systems: Synergies, policy lessons and overlooked dimensions

Building innovative capacity in regional entrepreneurship and innovation (eco)systems: Startups versus incumbent firms

“…This echoes with Schmutzler et al. (2020)'s note on the agency‐based dynamic processes of regional entrepreneurship. Hence, it is not only the access to the external knowledge environment but also proactive endeavors to cross‐fertilize between internal and external knowledge that underlie the eco‐systemic nature of startup innovation.…”

“…The ‘most prominent difference’ between the two, according to Schmutzler et al. (2020, p. 5), is that incumbent firms are the focal players in regional innovation systems, while startups are the focal players in entrepreneurial ecosystems. While the followers of entrepreneurial ecosystems address startups that are largely missing in the regional innovation system framework, they meanwhile do not consider the imperatives of established firms to support entrepreneurial leadership and innovative transformation under rapid technological changes—an emerging field captured by the notion of corporate entrepreneurship (see Phan et al., 2009 and Kuratko et al., 2015 for holistic reviews).…”

Taking the systems approaches out of their comfort zones: Perspectives from under explored contexts

“…This book primarily addressed the first gap we have mentioned, the lack of linkages of new entrepreneurial ecosystem approaches with older innovation system thinking. In this book, we aimed to bridge older and new concepts in the literature and create synergies and policy lessons from the wider body of work investigating (eco)systemic dynamics to regional development and associated themes (Pugh et al., 2020; Schmutzler et al, 2020). The second contribution, a special issue in Local Economy (Tsvetkova et al., 2019), was focused primarily on the geographical limits of the system and ecosystem approaches in the predominant literature, bringing in papers that examine cases in Latin America (Freire‐Gibb & Gregson, 2019; Podcameni et al, 2019; Porras‐Paez & Schmutzler, 2019), South Africa (Grobbelaar & Uriona‐Maldonado, 2019), and Finland (Nordling, 2019).…”

“… 1 1 Previous contributions to this stream of work include two edited books that broaden the geography of the innovation systems debate (Tsvetkova et al, 2017) and explore the linkages between innovation systems and entrepreneurial ecosystems (Tsvetkova et al, 2020). The need to understand the context and to adjust systemic approaches to the local settings in which they are applied is clearly presented by contributions in these books (for summaries, see Schmutzler et al, 2017, 2020). An editorial in the Local Economy journal (Tsvetkova et al, 2019) offers further reflections on the applicability of the systems approaches outside of the Global North. …”