Theorizing entrepreneurial ecosystems by taking a systems view?

In the past decade, the metaphor of the ecosystem has become increasingly popular in both academia and practice, capturing the idea of a transformative environment for the creation of innovative products and services. Within this literature, entrepreneurial ecosystems play a prominent role in facilitating the exploitation of previously non-commercialized knowledge and ideas via entrepreneurship, which serves as an essential determinant in the emergence and persistence of an ecosystem, or a regional economic system in general. While the number of works on this topic seems endless, our understanding of ecosystems-in terms of what we know, what we don’t know and what we should know-remains limited. Many questions have not yet been asked, due mainly to the eclectic approach that has been adopted when theorizing about ecosystems, borrowing and mixing concepts from different fields (e.g.., the natural sciences, sociology, economics and politics) and then combining them into a single “framework.” Consequently, a lack of theoretical strength leads to an “everything matters” approach and hinders the derivation of testable hypotheses. This chapter attempts to shed some light on the “eclectic paradigm” of ecosystems by briefly introducing the main concepts separately-that is, the concepts of entrepreneurial ecosystems in the natural sciences (biology) and in the social sciences (systems theory).