System Views on Entrepreneurship – Going in the Right Direction?

The literature on National Systems of Entrepreneurship (NSE) (Acs et al., 2014, 2016) has been claimed to be an important strand of entrepreneurship literature. This paper takes stock of system perspectives on entrepreneurship including recent re-vitalizations of the concept. Based on literature studies, the paper contributes with perspectives on whether the NSE literature is developing in a fruitful manner. It is found that the NSE literature has done a constructive effort to establish metrics that potentially can bring research forward towards a holistic understanding of the entrepreneurship process. However, deficiencies in the ‘new version’ of NSE are pointed out, and it is argued that major adjustments are needed in where the research is going. It is also proposed that more attention should be paid to implications for empirical analyses of the fact that entrepreneurship is a process going on in many different contexts and carried by multiple actors, and that solely focusing on output metrics of entrepreneurship misses the point. The implications from the analyses in the paper include not only renewed theoretical understanding, but also implications for entrepreneurship measurement, -teaching, and -policy.