Entrepreneurial ecosystem big picture: a bibliometric analysis and co-citation clustering

Abstract

Purpose As the main factor for sustainable development of countries, entrepreneurship is a difficult path only chosen by those who have a high level of risk-taking. On this path, entrepreneurship requires an ecosystem that welcomes this type of thinking and eliminates the barriers on the path as much as possible. This ecosystem comprises various components that attempt to pave the way in a private and public manner. The entrepreneurial ecosystem still has many latent aspects after several years. This study aims to provide a big picture of all studies published in the Web of Science database to help future researchers. Design/methodology/approach In this research, 765 scientific papers published in the database were analyzed using 3 main approaches of network analysis, co-occurrence analysis of keywords and co-citation clustering. Findings In the end, four major clusters were identified for articles in this field in the clustering section, including the entrepreneurial ecosystem, academic entrepreneurship, innovation ecosystem and institutional entrepreneurship. Originality/value This paper used a new approach for reviewing the entrepreneurial ecosystem and made a big picture of all previous research studies. In the end, an unsupervised machine learning approach was used to clustering the research studies and four major clusters were identified.