Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Economic Development: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are pivotal as agents who recognize opportunity, mobilise resources and create value to sustain economic development. The Theory of Economic Development argues that economic development positions the economy on a higher-quality growth trajectory and is achieved through innovation and entrepreneurship. Governments around the world have engaged in providing technology-based economic development incentives to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. Thus, the aim of this paper is to present the results of a systematic literature review on role of entrepreneurship and innovation in economic development of a country and answer the specific research questions identified to get an overview of the current research work. A systematic search is conducted in Web of Science (WoS) database using a BOOLEAN criterion. The paper presents both a thematic analysis and a descriptive analysis. The thematic analysis deepens the content of the papers. The descriptive analysis highlights the peculiarities of the extant literature. The results presented contribute towards providing an overview of the reviewed research papers and identifies existing research gaps on which future research efforts can be focused.