The entrepreneurial ecosystem governance: Evolution of policy and roles

Despite the popularity of the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature, scholars have almost overlooked and largely ignored policies that regional institutions deploy to grow their entrepreneurial ecosystems. The paper explores the nature of policies and programs that drive entrepreneurial ecosystems and shows how these changes overtime with the ecosystem evolution. The study represents an original attempt in clustering policy measures during entrepreneurial ecosystem's evolution. Evidence is taken from the Campania entrepreneurial ecosystem (South of Italy) and shows that a blend of top-down and bottom-up approaches are beneficial for the Campania ecosystem evolution. In addition, we identify three roles played by the regional institution along with three phases of ecosystem evolution: set-upper, dirigist and broker.