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The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy (JEPP).

The paper outlines the primary objectives of JEPP.

JEPP was created to encourage and disseminate quality research about the vital relationships among institutions, entrepreneurship and economic outcomes. JEPP 's aim is to improve the quality of scholarly and public discourse about entrepreneurship and development policies. In general, JEPP seeks high‐quality articles that say something interesting about public policy, entrepreneurship and economic development.

The editorial describes the thinking behind JEPP, and the journal's objectives. JEPP welcomes all scholars and individuals with professional or personal interests in acquiring and sharing knowledge about institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic outcomes.

Entrepreneurship development is known as a key enabler of economic development, hence it has been contemplated in the strategic plans of various countries. Iran is no exception in that regard, since developing entrepreneurship has been emphasized in the country's third and fourth development plans, in order to tackle the increasing rate of population growth and unemployment. Now, as the fourth development plan has come to its end, it is necessary to evaluate the policies and programs related to entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to assess the entrepreneurial development plans of this important Middle East country to provide a benchmark of influential policies on entrepreneurship development at both macro and micro level and to evaluate them accordingly.

Quantitative methods, namely survey and questionnaire distribution among experts dealing with entrepreneurship subjects have been used as the main method for data collection.

The results reveal that influential entrepreneurship policies at both macro and micro levels are not generally forward‐looking and supportive of entrepreneurship development. Therefore, some suggestions have been provided to develop these policies.

The paper presents findings of research which come from a rapidly‐growing, developing country, which can provide better insights from a less‐explored context and further add to the body of knowledge.

Entrepreneurship policy is a vital component of any entrepreneurial ecosystem. However, the specific policy initiatives that have a greater impact on women's entrepreneurship remain unclear in many developing economies. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of entrepreneurship policies targeted at women’s entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), this paper utilises and analyses secondary data collected by the World Bank's Women, Business, and the Law (WBL) from 1970 to 2020, encompassing 48 countries within SSA.

Through our analysis, we identified two configurations that sufficiently support women's entrepreneurship. First, a combination of gender-based policies focussing on enabling “access to credit” and “signing of contracts”; and second, a blend of policies supporting “signing of contracts”, “business registration”, and “opening a bank account”, represent significant antecedents to supporting women's entrepreneurship. These distinct pathways are crucial to fostering women’s entrepreneurship in the SSA region.

The study's findings indicate that the impact and effectiveness of entrepreneurship policies targeted at women entrepreneurs in developing economies depend on the effectiveness of other policies that are in place.

This study offers new insights into the intricate interrelationship between entrepreneurship policies and women’s entrepreneurship in developing countries by considering the interdependence and combinative value of gender-based policies that effectively support women’s entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa.

This chapter reviews and critiques the recent evolution of place-based entrepreneurship policy in the United Kingdom, in particular the governance of policies targeted at the regional level to promote economic development and competitiveness. The focus of the chapter is the evolution occurring from 1997, when the Labour government came to power, through to the period leading to the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, which came to power in 2010.

A review and critique of key academic and policy-based literature.

The chapter shows the way in which governance systems and policies aimed at stimulating entrepreneurship have permeated regional development policy at a number of levels in the United Kingdom. In general, the overarching themes of enterprise policy are similar across the regions, but the difference in governance arrangements demonstrates how emphasis and delivery varies.

Place-based enterprise policy needs long-term commitment, with interventions required to survive changes in approaches to governance if they are to prove effective; something which has been far from the case in recent years. Whilst the analysis is drawn from the case of the United Kingdom, the lessons with regard to the connection between regional modes of governance and effective policy implementation are ones that resonate across other nations that are similarly seeking to stimulate the development of entrepreneurial regions.

Evidence of ongoing disparities in regional economic development and competitiveness, linked to differences in regional business culture, suggest the continuance of market failure, whereby leading regions continue to attract resources and stimulate entrepreneurial opportunities at the expense of less competitive regions.

The time period covered by the chapter – 1997 onwards – forms an historic era with regard to changing regional governance and enterprise policy in the United Kingdom, with the emergence – and subsequent demise – of regional development agencies (RDAs) across English regions, as well as the introduction of regional governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, which were handed certain powers for economic and enterprise development from the UK central government.

Public policies provide a way for governments to influence the effectiveness of business strategies in the international marketplace. The main goal of this article is to show the importance of key aspects for policymaking at the national level and, secondly, to try to evaluate if public policies and programmes are effective in the entrepreneurship and internationalization of firms.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data set was used to perform a multivariate analysis through multiple linear regression.

The economic and financial crisis that has plagued the world recently has incentivized entrepreneurs to be more creative and encouraged policymakers to be more effective in the important role they can play in economic growth. Thus, the findings indicate that government support can help firms be more entrepreneurial and increase their level of internationalization in the marketplace. The findings indicate that entrepreneurship is an important growth factor, so it is important to understand government support can be effective in stimulating business activity.

This study focusses on perceptions of government policy based on the GEM database, which means it is limited to subjective assessments rather than objective measures.

The findings of this study will help business managers focus on their country of origin as a way to stress the impact of government policies on reputation in the international marketplace.

Governments need to acknowledge how their entrepreneurial policies regarding innovation and internationalization affect business success rate. This means emphasizing the trustworthiness and credibility of their policies.

This article highlights the need for more entrepreneurial policymaking that emphasizes government reputational affects in the success rate of firms in the international marketplace. This provides a way for firms to gain better recognition from country-of-origin effects but also for policymakers to prioritize international strategic efforts. By comparing data from different countries, the article highlights the different ways government policy can be utilized strategically in order to increase entrepreneurship and internationalization rates.

The paper aims to describe the manner in which entrepreneurship policies are embedded in the national contexts and then through analysis offers a deeper understanding of the development of Finnish and Irish entrepreneurship policies. It seeks to focus on three questions: What is the context for entrepreneurship policies in the studied countries?; What kind of governance structure for entrepreneurship policy can be identified and derived from theoretical perspectives?; and What policy instruments and content are associated with governance rationale?

The empirical data involve primary data on national entrepreneurship policy documents illustrating the governance structure for policy development and implementation, as well as policy objectives and targets. Additionally, concrete policy measures were studied within six sub‐areas of entrepreneurship. The analysis is based on a framework with two layers of policy: governance structure, and specific policy measures.

The results show that the countries studied are implementing strikingly similar approaches in entrepreneurship policy‐making: state‐institutional coordination marked by a strong role for the government, complemented by a more recent shift towards a competitive approach. Because political, national and economic context plays a significant role in understanding entrepreneurship policy approaches it is justified to add a third layer, context, to the framework.

Particular measures or good practices cannot be imported from other countries without understanding the theoretical rationale and policy context for the measures.

The study highlights the role of time and path‐dependency in policy‐making; therefore, future research and evaluations on entrepreneurship policies need to be strongly contextualised.

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.

As technological entrepreneurship has distinctive characteristics and needs particular conceptualizations, it is also important to have specific theoretical developments about its technological entrepreneurship. Studying the related domains like entrepreneurship and technology can be helpful in this path; however, their differences should be considered as well. The purpose of this study is to design a model in support of technological entrepreneurship. Since financing is considered as the main restriction on creating and developing technological entrepreneurship, the focus of this study is the research of financial policies of technological entrepreneurship..

This research is from the qualitative point of view and in terms of the purpose of application-development that has been done in the second part. At the first step, Iran’s (IRI) national comprehensive policies have been studied from 1993 to 2020; out of 52 documents, 7 were relevant, of which 38 policies were eventually selected. Then, policy statements were explored, and open coding and categorization has been done through theme analysis approach to attain fundamental themes and organizational themes. In the second step, the themes were extracted in the form of soft research method with the approach of interpretive structural modeling to level the financing policies of technological entrepreneurship in Iran.

The results show that the most important factors influencing financing and entrepreneurship in Iran are increasing the productivity of goods and services, supporting entrepreneurship, increasing the efficiency of monetary policies that are in the first level.

Research limitations include access to upstream documents, strategies, administrative and organizational coordination to study documents.

These findings are very important to scholars, the policymakers and technological entrepreneurship operators in designing their financing strategies. The results show that the most important factors influencing financing and entrepreneurship in Iran are increasing the productivity of goods and services, supporting entrepreneurship, increasing the efficiency of monetary policies.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to explore the explanation and classification of technology-based entrepreneurship financing policies in Iran. Moreover, the findings of this study would prove useful in detailed studies of financing policies in the Middle Eastern countries as well.

The purpose of this paper is to overcome the traditional general approach to sport policy by taking an entrepreneurial perspective. This helps link the fragmented literatures of entrepreneurship, public policy and sport entrepreneurship in order to develop a new perspective of sport entrepreneurship and public policy.

A literature review is conducted that highlights the need for public policy to focus on entrepreneurship in sports contexts.

In the past, sport policy focused more on governance and political elements but these can be embedded into a policy entrepreneurship perspective regarding sport. This helps to redefine and bridge the literature on sport entrepreneurship and public policy.

Most sport policy research has tended to take a more organizational behavior or political science approach. Thus, this paper takes a new perspective by incorporating the nascent sport entrepreneurship literature into public policy debates. This is helpful to public policy planners but also sports managers who need to work together to build better policy initiatives.

Government attention to women’s entrepreneurship has increased in the past two decades; however, there are few cross-cultural studies to inform policy development. This paper aims to draw on gender and institutional theory to report on the status of female-focused small and medium-sized enterprises/entrepreneurship policies and to ask how – and to what extent – do women’s entrepreneurship policies differ among countries?

A common methodological approach is used to identify gaps in the policy-practice nexus.

The study highlights countries where policy is weak but practice is strong, and vice versa.

The study’s data were restricted to policy documents and observations of practices and initiatives on the ground.

The findings have implications for policy makers in respect of support for women’s entrepreneurship. Recommendations for future research are advanced.

The paper contributes to extant knowledge and understanding about entrepreneurship policy, specifically in relation to women’s entrepreneurship. It is also one of the few studies to use a common methodological approach to explore and compare women’s entrepreneurship policies in 13 countries.