The OECD Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Diagnostics report introduces a novel framework and dataset to assess and compare entrepreneurial ecosystems across all 38 OECD countries. Rather than producing a single index to rank countries, the report adopts a multi dimensional approach based on three core components: inputs, outputs, and variation. Inputs cover ten essential elements—Institutions, Culture, Networks, Infrastructure, Markets, Finance, Knowledge, Talent, Leadership, and Intermediate Services—captured through composite indexes built from about 40 indicators drawn from OECD statistics and other sources. Outputs reflect entrepreneurial performance, with indicators such as startup rates and business survival. The variation dimension measures how entrepreneurship is distributed socially and regionally, with attention to inclusivity, particularly for women and distribution of startups across regions. Each dimension is tracked at three time points to monitor ecosystem evolution and progress. Designed as a policy support tool, the report provides robust, evidence based insights to identify systemic bottlenecks and guide national strategies. It aims at facilitating informed dialogue and targeted policy action to build dynamic and balanced national entrepreneurial ecosystems. Released as a pilot, this first edition lays the foundation for future iterations, with continued refinement of data and analytical depth to enhance its relevance and impact.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Diagnostics
Abstract
Executive Summary
Entrepreneurial ecosystems are the broad set of interacting actors and factors that impact on the scale and quality of entrepreneurship in a place. They comprise institutional conditions, such as entrepreneurial culture and business regulations, access to resources conditions, such as entrepreneurial finance and talent, and entrepreneurial outputs, in the form of different types of business start-ups and scale-ups.
This report presents data to help assess the state and evolution of national entrepreneurial ecosystems in OECD countries. It offers a diagnostic tool highlighting ecosystem strengths and weaknesses, pointing to where policy action may need to be reinforced.
It represents the first time such a benchmarking has been produced for all OECD countries, but it builds on long-standing OECD work in this area, including the OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurial Indicators Programme. As a first-edition, it is a pilot exercise, designed to demonstrate the relevance of entrepreneurial ecosystem diagnostics, provide first results, and motivate and accommodate improvements in indicators and data for future years.
The report aims to help policy makers and other entrepreneurial ecosystem stakeholders to:
Identify areas of strength and weakness in their entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions;
Start policy dialogues with entrepreneurial ecosystem actors on the nature and causes of bottlenecks and the potential responses;
Monitor progress in entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions over time;
Offer data for more detailed analysis of the functioning of entrepreneurial ecosystem inputs and outputs; and
Motivate longer-term investments to improve entrepreneurship data and indicators.
The data presented in the report offer an entry point for the diagnosis of areas where reinforced policy action may be required to support entrepreneurship in a country. However, they are only starting points, providing guidance on where more targeted stakeholder dialogues and analytical deep dives are needed.
The report presents quantitative data on levels of productive entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on the creation of employer firms and on the quality of the entrepreneurial ecosystem elements that affect the outputs. It also includes measures of the level of variation in entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions between the regions and social groups of a country. The presentation of results includes cross-country comparisons and country-level diagnostics. The report also gives examples of policies designed to strengthen entrepreneurial ecosystems as inspiration on how policy can intervene.
In summary, the indicators cover:
1. Measures of ten entrepreneurial ecosystem elements: Institutions, Culture, Networks, Infrastructure, Markets, Finance, Knowledge, Talent, Leadership, and Intermediate Services. Bottlenecks in any element are likely to have adverse impacts on entrepreneurship levels. The diagnostics include a summary score for each element and country and values for element sub-indicators. These indicators identify potential ecosystem bottlenecks.
2. Measures of productive entrepreneurship outputs, covering different aspects of start-up and scale-up performance. These aim to capture the extent to which new business ventures are created, survive and grow in a country. They can be related back to the quality of the elements, and show how well a country performs on different aspects of entrepreneurship relative to others.
Entrepreneurial ecosystem variation measures. These provide information on the extent of variation of productive entrepreneurship activity across regions and social groups in a country. This helps us understand the extent to which entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions differ between different regions and social groups, and consequently how far additional disaggregated information and more differentiated policy actions may be required.
These indicators aim to capture concepts and relationships that are well-grounded in the empirical research literature. They reflect the best indicators available at the current time covering a significant number of OECD countries.
Some key findings are as follows:
Variations in the quality of entrepreneurial ecosystem elements:
Countries vary significantly in the quality of their entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions. Some of the strongest differences are in the Leadership, Markets and Knowledge elements. These areas offer lagging countries the strongest potential for catch up by prioritising appropriate actions.
Variations in entrepreneurship outputs:
Countries vary in the amounts and types of entrepreneurship they generate. Theoretical and empirical literature indicate this is driven by the quality of the entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions and how they interact, although countries can use different combinations of ecosystem strengths to generate outputs and can be strong or weak on different entrepreneurship types. Between 2020 and 2023, the strongest countries in generating unicorns were Ireland, Israel, and the United States. For high-potential young start-ups, the best performers were Estonia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Countries with strong general enterprise birth rates included Colombia, Estonia, Korea, and Türkiye.
Change over time:
Overall, countries’ element scores are fairly stable over time. However, countries can also make rapid improvements. For example, since 2021, France improved its Institutions score, driven by a range of reforms including in its corporate tax system; Colombia, Czechia, Greece, Mexico, and Türkiye improved on Markets by enhancing trade facilitation; Estonia and Türkiye strengthened on Infrastructure by improving transport quality and mobile data use; and Portugal, Lithuania and Poland improved Talent by advancing digital skills.
Regional and social variation:
Some countries have more homogenous entrepreneurial ecosystems than others. For example, between 2020 and 2023 there was less variation in regional start-up rates in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States than in countries such as Chile and the Slovak Republic. Similarly, gaps between the start-up rates of women, youth, seniors and foreign-born people and middle-aged men were less marked in Colombia, Greece, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Sweden, compared with countries such as Japan and Italy.
Entrepreneurial ecosystem policies:
Several countries have introduced pioneering entrepreneurial ecosystem policies at national level. The report profiles the cases of TechLeap, the Netherlands; French Tech, France; and the Startup Act, Italy. Important features of these policies are that they are holistic (strengthening a number of ecosystem conditions at the same time), arms-length (working through independent entities), and focused on empowering entrepreneurs themselves to create initiatives. The first two also contain actions for regional entrepreneurial ecosystems within the country.
As a first edition, this report is a pilot. It is based on the best data available with wide OECD-area coverage at the current time and uses a simple diagnostic approach. Having made this first step, the exercise can be expanded on and refined in later editions.
One of the areas with potential for further developments is the addition of subnational analyses. Entrepreneurial ecosystems operate at both national and subnational levels, in a nested fashion. This report focuses on the national level, reflecting in part the greater availability of data at the national level, but also, the importance of national framework conditions. However, regional disaggregation can help help point to specific regional issues and challenges within countries.
In addition, if data availability improves over time, new indicators could be introduced particularly for ecosystem elements where current data are relatively weak, such as on Leadership or Networks. Moreover, presenting data for clubs of peer countries could assist benchmarking of ecosystems across similar contexts. Some analytical findings could also be included on the drivers of ecosystem performance.
This report provides initial evidence. However, for policy makers to make better decisions on where to prioritise entrepreneurship policy supports, it is also important that governments invest in improved entrepreneurship data, as well as foster country-level dialogue, discussion and research on entrepreneurship.
