Dr Sunghwan (Daniel) Cho

This chapter discusses the importance of production clusters and entrepreneurial firms continuously generating innovation if they are to sustain their long-term competitiveness in today’s global economy. The study of the complexity brought about by globalization has been investigated by the Global Value Chain (GVC) framework, which has improved the understanding of how clusters and firms compete globally. However, neither the cluster theory nor the GVC framework address firms’ innovation through an explicit dynamic perspective and dedicate only partial attention to the role of entrepreneurial ventures. This chapter draws on elements from the developing entrepreneurial ecosystems literature to complement the cluster-GVC perspective and offers a finer-grained approach to the study of innovation in the global economy.

The recent widespread interest of policy in entrepreneurial ecosystems has been complemented by a burgeoning academic research output. This research to date may be broadly categorized as focusing on place, actors, governance, and evolution. Of these groupings, evolutionary processes have been paid least attention despite their centrality to a dynamic ecosystem phenomenon that evolves from an origin through processes of growth, adaptation, and resilience. To redress this imbalance, we frame a future research agenda on evolutionary processes of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Foremost amongst these are the competing lens for the evolutionary processes, the appropriate and evolving geographic scope and boundaries of the ecosystem, and the evolving visible or invisible modes of governance. Methodologically, we call for greater use of longitudinal studies of such evolutionary processes.