Text mining the entrepreneurship policy agenda in the EU : from naïveté into reality

This paper analyses the learning curve in the emergence and development of an entrepreneurship policy in the European Union (EU) during the period 1990-2016 by identifying the key topics in the policy agenda-setting and their evolution over time within a corpus of 576 selected policy-making documents. To this end, the paper uses a combination of text mining techniques, cluster analysis and qualitative assessment, illustrating the possibilities of these tools to learn about the evolution of the policy cycle in a particular domain. The results from the analysis display three main stages, each of them with two sub stages. During the initial period, labelled (a) latent EU entrepreneurship policy, there were hardly any specific entrepreneurship policy initiatives and only some general enterprisefostering policies at the EU level which included, tangentially, SMEs and entrepreneurs, and lasted up to late 1990s. In the (b) emergent EU entrepreneurship policy stage, the initial steps of an entrepreneurship policy with a main focus on diagnosis of the entrepreneurial ecosystem and some measures of support - mainly to SMEs - can be traced from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. The third and last period to date is a (c) new normal for EU entrepreneurship policy, which is a more targeted stage aimed at promoting not only quantity but quality of business ventures; and is ongoing since the early 2010s. Overall, this paper provides a complete overview of the EU entrepreneurship policy evolution and concludes with a granular proposal for its evolution, identifying main themes and foundational concepts, establishing patterns, and finding temporal and contextual relations within the EU policy cycle.