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Academic research into entrepreneurship policy is particularly interesting due to the increasing relevance of the topic and since knowledge about the evolution of themes in this field is still rather limited. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the key concepts, topics, trends and shifts that have shaped the entrepreneurship policy research agenda during the period 1990–2016.

This paper uses text mining techniques, cluster analysis and complementary bibliographic data to examine the evolution of a corpus of 1,048 academic papers focused on entrepreneurship-related policies and published during the period 1990–2016 in ten relevant journals. In particular, the paper follows a standard text mining workflow: first, as text is unstructured, content requires a set of pre-processing tasks and then a stemming process. Then, the paper examines the most repeated concepts within the corpus, considering the whole period 1990–2016 and also in five-year terms. Finally, the paper conducts a k-means clustering to divide the collection of documents into coherent groups with similar content. The analyses in the paper also include geographical particularities considering three regional sub-corpora, distinguishing those articles authored in the European Union (EU), the USA and South and Eastern Asia, respectively.

Results of the analysis show that inclusion, employment and regulation-related papers have largely dominated the research in the field, evolving from an initial classical approach to the relationship between entrepreneurship and employment to a wider, multidisciplinary perspective, including the relevance of management, geographies and narrower topics such as agglomeration economics or internationalisation instead of the previous generic sectorial approaches. The text mining analysis also reveals how entrepreneurship policy research has gained increasing attention and has become both more open, with a growing cooperation among researchers from different affiliations, and more sophisticated, with concepts and themes that moved the research agenda forward, closer to the priorities of policy implementation.

The paper identifies main trends and research gaps in the field of entrepreneurship policy providing actionable knowledge by presenting the spectrum of both over-explored and understudied research themes in the field. In practical terms the results of the text mining analysis can be interpreted as a compass to navigate the entrepreneurship policy research agenda.

The paper presents the heterogeneity of topics under research in the field, reinforcing the concept of entrepreneurship as a multidisciplinary and dynamic domain. Therefore, the definition and adoption of a certain policy agenda in entrepreneurship should consider multiple aspects (needs, objectives, stakeholders, expected outputs, etc.) to be comprehensive and aligned with its complexity. In addition, the paper shows how text mining techniques could be used to map the research activity in a particular field, contributing to the challenge of linking research and policy.

The exploratory nature of text mining allows us to obtain new knowledge and reveals hidden patterns from large quantities of documents/text data, representing an opportunity to complement other qualitative reviews. In this sense, the main value of this paper is not to advise on the future configuration of entrepreneurship policy as a research topic, but to unwrap the past by unveiling how key themes of the entrepreneurship policy research agenda have emerged, evolved and/or declined over time as a foundation on which to build further developments.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the direct involvement of public administrations in the supply side of electronic communications markets based on the Spanish experience. It is an example of the difficult balance in the public private interplay in next generation electronic communications networks.

Starting from a general overview of the conditions for public intervention in the development of infrastructures established by the electronic communications regulatory framework, this paper analyses the case of Spain as an illustrative example taking into consideration some specific initiatives to illustrate the different possible mechanisms of intervention on the supply side.

It is the opinion of the authors that a framework of public‐private collaboration in the field of electronic communications infrastructure development is consistent with the industry liberalisation model chosen one decade ago in Spain and it could be particularly adequate in an environment of financial hardship such as the present one, which leads to a greater demand for efficiency in the use of public and private resources. However, the conditions and limitations for public involvement should be persistently respected. In addition, there are novel policy instruments on the supply side that could help the deployment of next generation networks without the burden of substituting private initiative.

The paper presents a systematic analysis of policy instruments for direct intervention of public administrations in the supply side of electronic communications market, including the specific situation of Spain. It is also a contribution to the debate on the role of public administrations in developing electronic communications infrastructures.

The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the policy tools to complement public involvement and public‐private collaboration in the deployment of next generation electronic communications infrastructures.

The special issue, of which this paper is a part, examines a number of policy tools that support public involvement and enhance public‐private partnering in next generation infrastructures, tools that are generally overlooked. The papers explore the main domains where these complementary actions might take place. They encompass policies directed to the demand and supply sides of the market, information society and industrial innovation policies, additional measures that can be taken by local and regional public administrations and new policy tools to foster user empowerment.

From the authors' perspective, public involvement and public‐private partnering for the deployment of next generation infrastructures in telecommunications will require an integrated policy approach. The appropriate policy mix includes instruments of innovation, information society development and new user empowerment.

This paper introduces a timely contribution to the debate on public support of next generation infrastructures in electronic communications.

The main purpose is to provide a global understanding of the role of women in entrepreneurship and family businesses, enabling the evaluation of the impact and the sentiment their role generates. To this end, empowerment and businesswomen's positioning through user-generated content (UCG) on Twitter is assessed.

The research is carried out from a quantitative and qualitative perspective through the evaluation of UGC from the social platform Twitter. A total of 37,852 tweets have been collected and subsequently analysed about the role of entrepreneurial women. For that purpose, a set of supervised machine learning algorithms have been developed for sentiment analysis, as a natural language processing (NLP) technique, outlining random forest as the one with the highest accuracy. Finally, social network analysis (SNA) techniques and graph theory are applied to a generated text-to-network, which enables the identification of the most relevant topics in the discussion.

The results revealed a positive relationship in the sentiment of the generated content in relation to women entrepreneurs and leaders. An increasing trend was evidenced in the number of published tweets, as well as in the identified topics, highlighting the needs and challenges faced by women in the business environment as the most widely discussed.

The study develops both theoretical and practical implications so that the findings result in applications in academia and society. The performed analysis creates consciousness about the challenges of women in society, specifically in entrepreneurship.

The study contributes to further enriching the literature on women's entrepreneurship by addressing UGC via Twitter around the role of women, entrepreneurship and power positions.

As good as existing measurements of entrepreneurial potential (EP) may appear in the literature, they are fragmented, suffer from the lack of theory integration and clarity, are inadequately specified and assessed and the dimensions are unordered by importance. These limitations of EP metrics have hindered entrepreneurial practice and theory advancement. There is a risk of atomistic evolution of the topic among “siloed” scholars and room for repetitions without real progress. The purpose of this paper was to take stock of existing measurements from which the authors developed a new instrument that is brief and inclusive.

The authors followed several steps to develop and validate the new instrument, including construct domain name specification, literature review, structured interviews with entrepreneurs, face validation by experts, semantic validation and statistical validation after two waves of data collected on employee and entrepreneur samples.

A clear operational definition of EP is proposed and serves as a starting point towards a unified EP theory. The new EP instrument is made up of 34 items classified into seven dimensions, which in order of importance are proactive innovativeness, management skill, calculated risk-taking, social skill, financial literacy, entrepreneurial competencies prone to cognitive and heuristic biases and bricolage. The authors provide evidence for reliability and validity of the new instrument.

Although a model is not the model, the authors discuss several ways in which the new measurement model can be used by different stakeholders to promote entrepreneurship.

The authors discuss the domain representativeness of the new scale and argue that the literature can meaningfully benefit from a non-fuzzy approach to what makes the EP of an individual. By developing a new EP instrument, the authors set an important pre-condition for advancing entrepreneurial theory and practice.