Factors affecting entrepreneurial ecosystem

One of the important contributions of entrepreneurship to economic life is undoubtedly creating employment. Increases in employment are welcomed by all segments of society, particularly policymakers. In this context, policymakers of the countries make various efforts to support the entrepreneurship, which they see as the solution of important problems such as unemployment. One of the new approaches to supporting regional entrepreneurship is the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach. When the literature is examined, there are lots of articles that examine how a sustainable and self-sufficient entrepreneurial ecosystem is formed and how it is developed. In this study, the current approaches and trends in the literature have been determined by examining the articles published in the recent period on the entrepreneurship ecosystem. Then, 154 articles published in English between 1995 and 2018 were examined with bibliometric methods and a detailed literature review of the most effective articles was performed. A conceptual framework has been formed on the entrepreneurial ecosystem and its components, based on the identified core literature collection and other related studies. The conceptual framework synthesized by using the works of Isenberg (2010), Isenberg (2011), Neck et al. (2004), Foster et al. (2013), Stam (2015), Feld (2012), Spigel (2017), and Spigel and R. Harrison (2018) focused entrepreneurs that are surrounded by social, cultural and material components It can be argued that the most fundamental difference that separates entrepreneurship ecosystems from other similar approaches is the inclusion of entrepreneurs in the focus of ecosystems and to accept that entrepreneurs are both input and output of the ecosystem. In other words, the entrepreneurship ecosystem approach suggests that physical and mechanical elements such as infrastructure and financial incentives are not enough for the emergence of an ecosystem, but there is also a need to taking into consideration human choice and decision criteria such as the establishment of institutions such as mentoring and angel investment and increasing the quality of cultural life areas together with mechanical elements. In order to create and develop an entrepreneurship ecosystem within the framework of the literature sources examined in this study, it can be said that, it is necessary to prioritize entrepreneurship by focusing on the separation of ambitious and innovative entrepreneurs from others, efforts should be made to achieve entrepreneurial quality rather than the number of entrepreneurs, first social networks should be supported, then to be supported by financial incentives; universities should be actively involved in entrepreneurship processes, and angel investors and venture capital should be used to finance entrepreneurs. In this context, efforts should be made to create and develop entrepreneurial ecosystems that will constitute the international competitiveness of our country.