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Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and the Role of Place :

Synthesising Insights from Micro, Meso, and Macro-Level Studies

Cities, regions, and countries are concerned with their innovative capacity, entrepreneurial activity, and, by extension, their competitive position in the globalised world. The focus of economic and innovation policy has seen a shift from the latter towards regional and city-level ‘place-based’ policy. In line with this, entrepreneurial ecosystems have becoming a widely-used approach by policy makers to stimulate regional economic development. The concept itself follows a long history of territorial models of innovation and entrepreneurship, which share a common foundation in the spatially bound interactions of a diverse set of actors. Building on this foundation, there is a growing consensus regarding what an entrepreneurial ecosystem is, yet how different ecosystem ‘configurations’ lead to different outputs remains unclear. In particular, how do ecosystems, which are inherently based on the role of ‘place’ and cross-industry fertilisation, interact with regional clusters as well as innovation ecosystems/platforms that are not geographically bound? How do ‘bottom-up’ dynamics and ‘top-down’ interventions interact and shape places? This track welcomes both empirical and conceptual papers focusing on different levels of analysis, from the microfoundations at the micro-level to meso- and macro-level dynamics and the resulting feedback effects.

Objectives

The aim of this track is to synthesise insights from micro, meso, and macro-level studies and advance our understanding of how more comprehensive approaches to innovation and enterprise policy drive regional socio-economic development.

Co-Chairs

  • Bernd Werth 
  • Christina Theodoraki 
  • Eleanor Shaw 

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