ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEMS POLICY FORMULATION: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Encouraged by the ubiquitous belief entrepreneurship's value as a source of economic growth, for many governments developing entrepreneurial ecosystems has become elemental to their development strategies, representing a prominent trend in public entrepreneurship policy. However, the entrepreneurial ecosystems field is recent, undertheorized, and fragmented, limiting its capacity to explain the effects of entrepreneurial ecosystem policies. Advancing research is crucial for advising policy makers on how to formulate effective entrepreneurial ecosystem policies that are decisive for developing ecosystems. Lacking such solid and coherent theoretical foundations, entrepreneurial ecosystem policies risk being ineffective, while policy makers tend to simply replicate entrepreneurial ecosystem policies from other entrepreneurial ecosystems. We aim to address this issue by providing guidance on key parameters to inform the formulation of entrepreneurial ecosystem policies. The development of entrepreneurial ecosystems requires customizing a mix of policies adapted to the unique characteristics of each ecosystem, promoting the quality of entrepreneurship to ensure the allocation of resources to productive use, and addressing the complexity of entrepreneurial ecosystems with a holistic policy approach. Based on our findings, we present a conceptual framework and discuss three parameters for policy formulation: top -down versus bottom -up formulation, support to systemic versus framework conditions, and holistic versus siloed approaches.