Internationalisation in entrepreneurial ecosystem and innovation system literatures: a systematic review

Abstract

Entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) has emerged an important new concept within the entrepreneurship and innovation research literatures. It emphasises the supporting role of the local and regional environment for the entrepreneur and has a specific focus on high growth firms (HGFs). EE research has similarities with other literature streams specifically the innovation systems (IS) literature but the relationship between them is ambiguous, which hampers the theory development. Furthermore, it is unclear how internationalisation is approached by the IS and the EE research. To fill this gap, the current paper offers a systematic literature review (SLR) of the similarities and differences between the IS and the EE concepts in the specific context of HGFs' internationalisation. We analyse 67 relevant peer-reviewed journal articles. The findings suggest that, on one hand, the EE has some similarities to IS due to their emphasis on the importance of the external business environment. On the other hand, EE is strongly centred on individual entrepreneurs and high growth ventures giving less importance to the government's role, which has been the case in IS literature. We also found that the internationalisation of HGFs to be an under-researched area of research in this domain, which requires further empirical analysis.