Resumo

This study seeks to provide a broad and comprehensive systematic review of the literature about entrepreneurial ecosystems in different contexts that identify, refresh, and integrates their various attributes, actors, subsystems, and knowledge structures used to make assessments, judgments, and decisions to assess opportunities for the creation, survival, and development of new ventures. A systematic and thorough review of the literature was carried out in the Web of Science and content analysis was done using the NVivo and VosViewer.

The review focused on the question: what conditions and variables influence entrepreneurial activities and affect the results of entrepreneurial ecosystems? The main objective was to present a holistic theoretical framework of entrepreneurial ecosystems with dynamic aspects encompassing attributes, subsystems, relationships between main actors, and underlying mechanisms. Specifically, we sought to include studies on EE in emerging and undeveloped economies and new ecosystems in areas that are not central and far from large conglomerates, considering qualitative and quantitative analysis.

This study represents the first attempt to analyze the emerging literature on knowledge sharing in entrepreneurial ecosystems through a holistic, dynamic, and multilevel approach. Also, integrate and extract potential theoretical contributions and propose an integrated conceptual model that contextualizes dynamics emerging from these ecosystems and a relevant and innovative research agenda that guides future research. The literature focused on entrepreneurial ecosystems and knowledge sharing and their reflexes on regional development through new ventures created.

Among the descriptive results, we point out the principal authors with the number of citations and link strength, the evolution of publications per year, leading journals and regions analyzed, and the main types and research methods. The authors' co-citation used the VOSViewer software with bibliographic coupling and mapping for the results' analysis. The multidimensional scaling (MDS) produced a relationships map between the 46 articles using data from the standard reference matrix revealing a three clusters' formation by similarities, highlighting the most relevant authors per cluster.

The thematic clusters' research suggests that the literature approached the topic in three different perspectives of the dynamics of ecosystem relationships: between attributes, between actors and stakeholders, and between subsystems and other entrepreneurial ecosystems. Besides, the results allow identifying static and dynamic dimensions that influence knowledge sharing in such environments. The mixed-methods approach sheds light on the central aspects that led to identifying new knowledge-sharing directions in ecosystems and their reflexes on regional development.

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