Entrepreneurial ecosystems in an interconnected world: emergence, governance and digitalization

Achieving and sustaining growth depends on the effective work of multiple and interconnected actors-such as e.g. governments, the private sector, society, universities, entrepreneurs and many others-who build an ecosystem, i.e. a social and economic environment for innovative and entrepreneurial endeavors. The underlying idea is that firms do not just compete with each other through well-developed stand-alone strategies to achieve advantages over their rivals, uniquely relying on their own resources, knowledge, and capabilities, but rather base their business models on shared resources, network externalities, knowledge spill-overs, local endowments, and governmental support. This introductory article offers a wide array of topics, methods and fields of application within the field of entrepreneurial ecosystems as well as a theorizing about potential fruitful future areas of research within the field, concentrating on legitimation and identification processes in ecosystems, possibly culminating towards a meta-identity of the ecosystem.