Improved Regional Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Eastern Europe: A Romanian Policy Approach

Background

The manner in which a business can become more competitive and provide more value for its shareholders is by no means a matter of novelty in economics research. Nor is the use of concepts from cybernetics, physics or biology to make sense of the complex systems and interactions in an economic environment. In the same vein of enabling a more profound understanding of the completely unknown, the trend nowadays in literature is to compare the business systems with biological, as suggested by Moore (1993). Value sharing becomes in this context an issue of systemic viability, rather than a matter of competitiveness (Peltoniemi, 2004). The business ecosystem, defined as “a collection of agents acting selfish or selfless, bringing added value and synergy learn from others” is nonetheless hard to identify rigorously. The boundaries of the concept are superficial (Anggraeni, Den Hartigh, & Zegveld, 2007), and often it is being used interchangeably with entrepreneurial or entrepreneurship ecosystem ((Napier & Hansen, 2011); (Malecki, 2011); (Kantis & Federico, 2012); (Isenberg, 2010)). For the latter, the authors of this chapter shall use the Mason and Brown definition (2014):