The OECD examines the elements that affect the health of a regional entrepreneurial ecosystem. These cover access to resources conditions like finance, talent and skills, and knowledge. They also cover institutional conditions like entrepreneurship culture, networks and regulations for start-ups and scale-ups. A bottleneck in any part of an ecosystem can impede the functioning of many other aspects of the system.

It is important to analyse regional entrepreneurial ecosystems to identify the enablers and bottlenecks and suitable policy responses, although there are often common issues across regions, such as lack of an entrepreneurial culture, lack of access to risk capital and weak knowledge exchange networks. The OECD supports this work by analysing the regional entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions that affect productive entrepreneurship through benchmarking, econometric analysis and case study analysis. The OECD works with national governments to identify changes in the regional ranking of entrepreneurship performance in the country over time. It can also work with national governments and/or regions to undertake case study assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of specific case study regional ecosystems and to provide recommendations, action plans and stakeholder engagement discussions.