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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.

Within the last two decades, entrepreneurship education has become institutionalized in Germany. It is offered as a stand-alone program or as part of a business degree, combining academic knowledge, practical skills, and personal development to enhance the entrepreneurial success of university graduates. While entrepreneurship education has experienced similar growth worldwide, its emergence in Germany is closely tied to the country’s political and economic developments. The significance of entrepreneurship education for a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and contemporary economic policy has been instrumental in advancing its academic recognition. This chapter provides a historical analysis of the academization of entrepreneurship in Germany. It explores the recursive and often idiosyncratic processes involving state and financial institutions, companies, and universities that have created, respecified, and mutually reinforced a subdiscipline and field of study. Academic entrepreneurship knowledge successively not only became relevant for starting a business but also for employment within the entrepreneurial infrastructure and beyond. This chapter follows a chronological order, highlighting three key stages in the academization of entrepreneurship education. First, the academic, financial, and political roots (I) of entrepreneurship up until the 1970s. Second, it explores the transformation (II) of entrepreneurship into a viable policy alternative and the challenges faced in establishing complementary research and education in higher education institutions during the 1980s. Finally, it sketches the institutionalization (III) of entrepreneurship as a central driver of government economic policy, allowing for the late bloom of entrepreneurship education and research at universities around the turn of the millennium.

This chapter aims to conceptualize the general framework of policies to support entrepreneurship and competitiveness by indicating a move from a dispersive comprehension of competitiveness towards an integrated macro-meso-micro perspective, by taking as a case study the European South. First, it presents theoretical contributions to entrepreneurship enhancement policies, which mostly suggest that intervention can be effective in a fragmentary and relatively incoherent way. Then, it counter-proposes the ‘competitiveness web’ approach, which gives an integrated policy framework for the competitive strengthening and evolution of a socioeconomic system. In the framework of competitiveness web, we analyze and propose a meso-micro level policy via the Institutes of Local Development and Innovation (ILDI), which is a policy for empowering the local and regional business ecosystems through the enhancement of business innovation. Finally, by using the competitiveness web filter, we propose the structuration of a mechanism that could identify the level at which the socioeconomic entities in different spatial levels can articulate their policies for entrepreneurship enhancement in the macro-meso-micro integrated approach.

In this conceptual chapter we examine the impact of the institutional role of public social policy as opposed to the individual role of private social entrepreneurship on the process of social change and value creation.

We review the above fields in order to identify their common and distinctive characteristics. We also examine how each contributes to social value creation and in which way these two sources of social value creation can interact in order to maximize their positive impact.

The value of our work relies on the development analysis reveals that the intersection between social policy and social entrepreneurship constitutes one of the possible responses to the growing uncertainty in the global economy and society. In a conceptual level, the findings of our theoretical inquiry allow us to provide a framework for better understanding the nature and the possible implications of social entrepreneurial/policy activities that allows the appropriate selection of the proper actions to be made for theorists, practitioners, and policy-makers alike.

Our work contributes to existing literature by providing views on understanding how the different forms of organizational actions (public policy vs. social entrepreneurship) act toward social value creation; and by contributing to the understanding of their similarities and differences and the distinctive frameworks within which they unfold.

This chapter explores the relationship between entrepreneurship skills and decent work (DW), and how policy can help achieve this. We review the entrepreneurship skills literature in the context of DW, highlighting the key entrepreneurship skills needed in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Thereafter, we extract lessons from selected policy initiatives in countries with broad similarities (Australia, Canada, United States and England), through the lens of DW. Our review draws on peer-reviewed journals and key United Nations and global entrepreneurship platform publications. Entrepreneurship skills deficiencies have a detrimental impact on the success and sustainability of SMEs. Yet, SME's survival and growth is currently crucial, whereby organizations need to transform in response to changing environmental, political, technological and consumer needs. This is intensified by the challenges of Covid-19, severely affecting DW and productivity. To develop and retain even a semblance of ‘decent work’, entrepreneurs need to develop appropriate skills and there is a need for suitable policy addressing this. In this chapter, we present lessons learnt based on our review and provide recommendations for entrepreneurship skills development policies aligning with DW.

This chapter uses discourse analysis to explain why entrepreneurship has become a primary response to Africa’s youth employment challenge. It analyses almost 20 years of academic literature and publications from one of the world’s foremost authorities on entrepreneurship: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The study found that youth were positioned within a discourse of entrepreneurial essentialism; where entrepreneurship was narrativised as the only option for youth employment; and youth were framed as entrepreneurship being the natural solution for them. Youth were concurrently framed within numerous contradictory entrepreneurial discourses which were used to elevate and legitimise entrepreneurship as the key pathway for addressing Africa’s youth employment challenge. An important finding in this study was that the dominant model of entrepreneurship being promoted by GEM to address the challenge is a mainly skills-based pathway to self-employment and low-growth microenterprise development. This is concerning for two reasons: firstly, global evidence does not demonstrate much support for such an approach, and secondly, it undermines other responses to youth unemployment, particularly those which seek to address more structural, demand-side barriers to employment.

This study critically analyzes the micro-, meso- and macro-level factors that influence the female academics to engage in academic entrepreneurship (AE). The extant literature, which seeks to understand the female academics engagement in AE mostly revolves around a gender-comparative lens, where women entrepreneurs are understood only in comparison with men. This study examines the association between informal academic entrepreneurship (IAE) and the level of asymmetry between the micro-, meso- and macro-level factors (5M framework). In this study, the author conducted three interviews with female academics in Bangladesh.

Although entrepreneurial capacity building is a keenly debated topic in migration and diaspora research, the concept of female entrepreneurial capacity and the framing of highly skilled migrant women has remained underexamined. This chapter, therefore, addresses knowledge gaps related to migrant women entrepreneurs (MWEs) by focusing on the entrepreneurial experiences of highly skilled female migrants from both developed and developing countries. Specifically, we turn the ‘disadvantage’ lens towards migrant women’s inherent entrepreneurial dimension, an issue that deserves greater research attention, linking migrant women and their entrepreneurship to the entrepreneurial host context and business environment. Building on rich qualitative data collected via six semi-structured interviews with MWEs based in Finland, we also make practical suggestions for how MWEs can best engage with their entrepreneurial ecosystem as well as suggestions to policy-makers regarding how to improve gender awareness and migrant inclusivity aspects of entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Aim: This chapter aims to examine the connection between government policies and entrepreneurial dimensions present in 13 European Union member countries, over the period 2002–2019. As long as the policies represent a set of decisions and actions issued by state-run structures, bodies with political, legislative, and financial authority to act to deal with a matter of public interest, this study overviews how intervention channels and policy instruments act upon supporting entrepreneurship.

Method: The methodology employed consists of correlations, principal component analysis (PCA), and regression models, in order to emphasise the statistically significant relationships between governance indicators and several entrepreneurial dimensions (financing for entrepreneurs, taxes and bureaucracy, basic school entrepreneurial education and training), and also the robustness of the results.

Results and Discussion: After observing the correlations evidencing strong relationships between the governance indicators, the results from PCA returned two main components for the Worldwide Governance Indicators: one incorporates the direct effect of control of corruption, government effectiveness, voice and accountability, regulatory quality, and rule of law, while the second component is based on political stability and absence of violence/terrorism factor. Results proved that governance has a significant impact on the financing available for entrepreneurs, especially from the first principal component, while taxes and regulations applied to new businesses have more impact in supporting entrepreneurship in countries with lower political stability levels. The consistent regression results emphasised that entrepreneurs feel more support from an institutional environment and more financing opportunities in an economy characterised by good governance, and taxes and regulations applied to new businesses have more impact in supporting entrepreneurship in countries with lower political stability levels.

Originality/Value: This study contributes to the literature studying the role of government policies on economic growth, by bringing more insights on the governance aspects and policies which are more favourable to productive entrepreneurship.

Despite the mounting evidence of gazelles’ higher economic contribution, there is no consensus on whether and how to support gazelles. In this chapter, we therefore discuss varied gazelle policy views as well as the inherent challenges of supporting gazelles. Here, we draw on relevant academic literature as well as on international policy examples. Additionally, we analyze Germany’s gazelle policy stance by triangulating information collected from the literature, practical policy examples and interviews, we carried out with German support agencies and policymakers. Though Germany’s general policies and framework conditions create necessary conditions for gazelles to emerge, they are insufficient to guarantee their prevalence. Moreover, Germany’s policy approach of encouraging new firm formation and self-employment and its focus on the financial support for small as well as technology or innovation-oriented firms is not consistent with the state-of-the-art knowledge about gazelles. Using the case of Germany, we argue that general entrepreneurship policies and high-growth entrepreneurship (gazelle) policies are distinct approaches having divergent and sometimes conflicting objectives and support mechanisms, which need to be synchronized to be effective.