BUILDING ATLANTIS IN AIR: PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE OF THE CONCEPT OF “ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEMS

Both academic and practitioner-oriented literature has embraced the metaphor of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) to describe spatial concentrations of economic activity and advocates prescriptions to build them.While building EEs has in the recent years been the holy grail of public policy across the globe,the effort has seldom met with intended success. However, the philosophical underpinnings and possible consequences of the choice of such metaphor remain unexplored.This conceptual paper adopts a philosophical gaze to review the philosophical origins of the metaphor,to critique the ontological, epistemological and teleological assumptions that are made to facilitate the choice of this metaphor and investigates how the metaphor has impacted research around the concept.