342myriad of nodes. Entrepreneurs, inventors, early- and later-stage ﬁnanciers, key personnel, and customers are all actors whose skills and abilities are necessary to realize an entrepreneurial project. When mission-oriented policies play a large role in an industry’s production or ﬁnancing, connections between actors in the innovation bloc risk being severed, severely curtailing the scope for actors to play their requisite roles. Thus, there is a risk that such policies do more harm than good for innovation and economic growth.

Keywords Entrepreneurial ecosystems · Collaboration · Entrepreneurship policy · Institutions · Innovation policy

1 Introduction

Mariana Mazzucato stands out among contemporary economists for her emphasis on the importance of innovation to achieving prosperity and a greater quality of life. The relevance of this focus cannot be in doubt: innovations are estimated to account for more than nine-tenths of the increase in GDP per capita since 1870 (Baumol, 2010) and have been depicted as “the only way for the most developed countries to secure sustainable long-run productivity growth” (Bloom et al., 2019, p. 163).

N. Elert (*) · M. Henrekson Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: niklas.elert@ifn.se; magnus.henrekson@ifn.se