Entrepreneurship is a key driving force in economic growth and innovation. Its scale and quality vary across countries, reflecting differences in their enabling and hindering conditions for entrepreneurship. These conditions are set out in the concept of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, which identifies the relevant actors, factors and interactions in a place.
While the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept has been widely adopted in entrepreneurship policy and research in recent years, there remains a gap in our capacity to measure the different aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems and diagnose where policy reforms may be required. This report offers a first theoretically and empirically informed dataset and benchmarking tool aimed at supporting the diagnosis of entrepreneurial ecosystems for all 38 OECD countries based on an operationalisation of the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept.
This work builds on and extends the OECD’s pioneering role in developing entrepreneurship indicators over the past 20 years. It is seen as a first, pilot, step, in an ongoing exercise. It makes use of the best data available today for a sufficient number of countries but also provides an impulse for the generation and collection of improved entrepreneurship data, which can be reported on in future exercises.
The report contains indicators of entrepreneurial ecosystem inputs, outputs and variation for each OECD country, covering their recent evolution over time, cross-country benchmarking and individual country profiles. It aims to assist policy makers to compare performance on entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions within and across countries and to develop hypotheses on what may be supporting or holding back entrepreneurship in their countries and what policy reforms and actions may be needed.
The report therefore takes first step in entrepreneurial ecosystem diagnosis for policy development. It represents a high-level assessment offering initial insights on the ecosystem conditions that may require further development in different countries. These first insights can be followed up with more detailed country-level analyses and stakeholder dialogues on the nature and causes of any barriers and how to react through entrepreneurship policy.
The report forms part of the work of the OECD Committee on SMEs and Entrepreneurship on boosting SMEs and entrepreneurs as engines of resilience and growth, and notably its work on start-up and scale-up policies. The broad ecosystem measurement presented here is complemented by OECD country-level and thematic analyses in this area.
An earlier version of the report was presented for discussion at the 7th session of the Committee on SMEs and Entrepreneurship (CSMEE) on 5 November 2024 [CFE/SME(2024)18]. Further details on the data and methodology used for the diagnostics are provided in a companion working paper.