Abstract

This chapter aims to discuss possibilities of bridging the innovation systems (IS) and the entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) literatures. While the former explains how actors interact on innovation development and how institutions contribute to this process, the latter focuses on the entrepreneur as the unit of analysis. However, both literatures are important to explain why and how firms innovate. Thus, we analyze the main similarities and differences between the entrepreneurial ecosystems and the innovation systems approaches regarding three critical dimensions: the individual, the firm/organization and the institutional context. We also highlight three types of entrepreneurship that demonstrate the benefits of integrating the two literatures: knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship and green entrepreneurship. After the introduction, section 2 presents the IS and EE literatures and section 3 their similarities and differences. Section 4 presents the concepts that require an integration of IS and EE and section 5 the conclusions.