Competitiveness of High-Tech Start-Ups and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: An Overview

High-tech start-ups are emerging rapidly all over the world, particularly in the developed world and emerging economies, since the early 2010s. So are the entrepreneurial ecosystems. Despite the growth in ecosystems, the rate of success of high-tech start-ups has hardly experienced an increase during this period. As a result, while an innumerable number of high-tech start-ups emerge, a considerably small proportion of the emerged ones is able to survive, and only a negligible proportion of the survived ones scale up. Though the number of Unicorns emerged from the start-up hubs has increased significantly in 2021, these Unicorns still account for a minute proportion of the emerged high-tech start-ups in almost every start-up hub recognized globally. This brings to the fore the critical importance of “competitiveness of high-tech start-ups”, and the need to explore the factors which determine the competitiveness, in the context of entrepreneurial ecosystems. It is against this backdrop that we invited scholarly articles, empirical studies, reviews and perspective papers based on the theme “Competitiveness of High-tech Start-ups and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems”. This article presents the editorial observations, summary of the select articles, followed by future research directions (for academicians) and provides managerial and policy recommendations.