Guest editorial: Unveiling the roles of intellectual capital in entrepreneurial ecosystems: evidence from moderate innovative countries

Following the surge of interest for business scholars in the approach of ecosystem initially proposed by Moore (1993), the novel concept of an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) coined by Prahalad (2005), as a combination of manifold stakeholders from private and public sectors to generate economic wealth and societal prosperity in a symbiotic manner, has also gained prominence in recent years. Despite some similarities and overlap between the EE and several homologous terms, including the business ecosystem (Moore, 1993), the innovation ecosystem (Adner, 2006) and the knowledge ecosystem (Van der Borgh et al., 2012), the EE has been deemed as a distinctive type of ecosystem in various fields of management. Simply stated, the EE is analogous to the above-mentioned ecosystems in terms of developing business platforms akin to biological systems where all stakeholders have shared sets of technological devices and networking architectures and thereby tightly or loosely interact with one another to create value (Chin et al., 2022). However, the EE differs from the others in its extraordinary emphasis on the roles that governments, policymakers and ecosystem leaders play in stimulating, supporting and nurturing entrepreneurship (Scaringella and Radziwon, 2018; Regele and Neck, 2012).