This report presents a new OECD diagnostics tool for assessing national entrepreneurial ecosystems in OECD countries. Although there are some other international tools aimed at analysing entrepreneurship conditions, they typically address different geographies or different kinds of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship drivers. This tool fills an important gap by presenting data for the whole OECD area. It also has the strength of taking a comprehensive and systemic approach based on a conceptual framework and indicators backed by academic research.
Policymakers can use the report as a starting point for assessing and monitoring their national entrepreneurial ecosystems, extending and validating or adjusting the insights through deeper analyses and stakeholder dialogues. Further analysis in specific countries can examine the nature and causes of issues highlighted by the benchmarking and investigating the potential policy reforms that could be introduced. Governments can potentially work hand-in-hand with the OECD in such country assessments. Stakeholder dialogues, in particular, should be encouraged, bringing together policy makers, entrepreneurs, and representatives of communities with strong influences on ecosystem conditions such as universities, corporates, and investors, in order to discuss strong and weak areas and how improvements can be made. The tool can be used as a factual high-level starting point for these conversations and analyses.
Going forward, the OECD is committed to continue providing data and insights that feed into the design of relevant and effective entrepreneurship policies. A key priority is for governments to work with the OECD to produce more specific, timely and relevant data on different aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems drawing on a wider range of official and non-official data. This includes improved internationally-comparable data on business start-ups and scale-ups, including by the regions of a country, different aspects of the quality of entrepreneurship (survival rates, growth rates, knowledge intensity etc.), and the nature of the business founders (gender, education, previous occupation etc.). Richer data are also needed to better measure various elements of entrepreneurial ecosystems, for example additional measures of knowledge, finance (e.g. financial literacy, capital raised or startup valuations), ecosystem leadership, networking among different ecosystem actors, or talent (e.g. willingness of graduates to work in startups).
Further possible directions for the work are to undertake specific and complementary ecosystem diagnostic analyses at sector-specific level (e.g. deeptech entrepreneurship, green entrepreneurship etc.), at sub-national level (identifying regional ecosystem conditions within countries), or at the level of different population groups (e.g. entrepreneurial ecosystems for women entrepreneurs).
In addition, analytical work can be undertaken using the data assembled for this exercise to examine relationships between different ecosystem inputs and outputs, inter-relationships among elements within ecosystems and commonalities and differences in ecosystem conditions and drivers across different subsets of countries (e.g. clubs of peer countries).
To support this agenda, individual countries and consortiums of countries may collaborate with OECD on country-specific analyses and collaborative data sharing and benchmarking exercises. Through the publication of this first version of the tool, the OECD aims to open the way for improvements of the framework through ongoing dialogues and exchanges with policy makers and experts.
