ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurial processes couple the expanding business with new interactive socio-economic milieus as represented by new regional markets, new client industries or new segments of the talent market. Therefore, the necessary learning and innovation processes of an entrepreneurial professional service firm embrace not only the discovery of industry-specific facts and skills, but also the firm’s ‘embedding’ itself into and ‘shaping’ the ‘new’ social context with its own local regulations and institutional practices. Entrepreneurship as an institution is founded on ideals such as cultural individualism and change. Three main approaches to investigating the entrepreneurial professional service firm may be identified: new venture management processes, the development and embedding of new practices in professional service firms, and the governance of entrepreneurial firms. The chapter suggests that the broadening perspective on entrepreneurship and professional service firms by taking an entrepreneurial ecosystems perspective. The entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective puts an emphasis on the network relationships between the various actors.
