Indicators to Monitor Regional Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Case of Seoul City

Abstract

In this study, we aim to introduce a methodological approach to develop indicators to monitor a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem. Based on prior literature survey, we first selected the following six key dimensions - talent, market, finance, support, specialization, and performance. Then, we shifted our attention to deriving 41 indicators that consist of those six dimensions via literature review and focus group interview(FGI). Lastly, among those indicators, we opted for 14 indicators by adopting the Delphi method with 20 experts and subsequently incorporated 8 more indicators if they were considered inevitably essential. As a result, we were able to propose 22 indicators in total. Then, by employing the indicators developed above, we tried to measure the regional startup ecosystem of Seoul. As a result, while the numerical values of talent, market, finance, support, and specialization improved in 2020 compared to those in 2019, the numerical value of performance diminished in the same period. These findings indicate that the startup ecosystem of Seoul suffered from inefficiency in the reference time points. Although the indicators proposed have several limitations unless data are consistently collected over time, they can be commonly used when comparing one region with others both domestically and globally. Therefore, various types of comparative studies attracting researchers' attention can be conducted in the future.