Looking inside the spiky bits : a critical review and conceptualisation of entrepreneurial ecosystems

The authors wish to thank the Organisational for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for funding their original research on entrepreneurial ecosystems.The concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems has quickly established itself as one of the latest ‘fads’ in entrepreneurship research. At face value, this kind of systemic approach to entrepreneurship offers a new and distinctive path for scholars and policy makers to help understand and foster growth-oriented entrepreneurship. However, its lack of specification and conceptual limitations has undoubtedly hindered our understanding of these complex organisms. Indeed, the rapid adoption of the concept has tended to overlook the heterogeneous nature of ecosystems. This paper provides a critical review and conceptualisation of the ecosystems concept: it unpacks the dynamics of the concept; outlines its theoretical limitations; measurement approaches and use in policy-making. It sets out a preliminary taxonomy of different archetypal ecosystems. The paper concludes that entrepreneurial ecosystems are a highly variegated, multi-actor and multi-scalar phenomenon, requiring bespoke policy interventions.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Economic geographies of the illegal: the multiscalar production of cybercrime

Economic geographers have traditionally been reluctant to extend their analysis to illicit and illegal markets despite their being significant in their global economic extent and displaying highly uneven geographies. By contrast, the geographies of licit, legal industries have produced multiple traditions of empirically rich, theoretically diverse accounts. Our understandings of the spatialities of illicit and illegal ‘industries’ derive from a different set of intellectual traditions for whom space is a less explicit, central concern. This paper aims to advance our understanding of the geographies of illegal economic activities by exploring the spatialities of one illegal industry, cybercrime (online for-profit fraud), through the lens of economic geography. It considers the spaces within which cybercrime is embedded, exploring it as the product of factors operating at multiple scales. It reviews cybercrime scholarship focused, variously, at the local, national and transnational scales and examines factors salient to the production of cybercrime through case studies at these scales. It examines national level drivers of cybercrime, local cybercrime agglomerations in Europe and transnational asymmetries, connections and opacities and the production of cybercrime. In each case, it reflects upon the potentials for the development of more spatially informed readings of cybercrime specifically, and illegal economic activities more generally, and considers how this might be mobilised to inform anti-cybercrime policy. The paper speaks to both theme I of this special edition ‘the interactions, the norms, the rituals, the behaviours of OCGs in physical spaces’ and theme III ‘the interactions between OCGs and institutions such as the political and economic field’

Smart University for Sustainable Governance in Smart Local Service Systems

From the Service Science perspective, our work tends to provide a conceptual and methodological contribution to affirm the role of the university as the responsible agent for the growth and development of a local area. In this sense, the purpose is to promote a harmonious growth of the whole local service system, focused on academic quality and accountability through the approach to Social Responsibility, also involving government, business and society. The University as a place for higher education and research, at the same time, represents a privileged space of convergence of different growth perspectives of the local actors. This convergence should be seen as a “place” to share and develop a common sense of value that is smart, ethically, socially, and economically sustainable, i.e. a Smart Local Service System (S-LSS)

Place-bound versus footloose firms: wiring metropolitan areas in a policy context

D21, O32, R58,