Mapping and defining entrepreneurial ecosystems: a systematic literature review

This paper carries out a systematic literature review on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs). In complying with the research protocol, after validating 1122 publications, the year in which the greatest number of publications was recorded, the journals publishing most, the authors with the greatest number of articles and the most cited articles were all identified. Innovation, clusters and open innovation are revealed to be the most important streams of literature. From an analysis of social networks, word co-occurrence and co-citations, and cluster analysis, EEs are defined as a set of interdependent actors and coordinated factors, in order to allow entrepreneurship within a given territory. Here, innovation is considered to reflect a new idea and that clusters originating in the spatial concentration of principal and supporting companies use open innovation combining intentionally internal and external knowledge flows, to accelerate internal innovation and market expansion for the purpose of using innovations externally.