Transition Economy Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Emergence: A review, insights, and future research directions Victor Schiller Bayes Business School / City, University of London “The Berlin Wall wasn’t the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people, and ideas also fell.” -- Fareed Zakaria - journalist, political commentator, CNN host Abstract Since 1989, the former communist Eastern European, Balkan region, and Baltic State transition economies have been extensively investigated by practitioners, policymakers, and researchers. Despite expectations of entrepreneurship as a key driver in these economies, existing research has not fully captured the mechanisms, phenomena, and pathways that enable or impede productive entrepreneurship in these emerging markets. This task remains particularly elusive due to the multiple levels at which these mechanisms operate. Therefore, this paper aims to do two things. First, it reviews developed economy entrepreneurship literature and proposes a three-element conceptual model derived from existing studies on those established entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE)s. This model demonstrates how the combined effects and interplay between the key concepts of stakeholder alignment, entrepreneur mindset, and sociocultural influences can collectively impact productive entrepreneurship. Second, it applies this model to systematically analyze transition economy research, identifying the combined multi-level effects of these key elements and how they can foster or hinder entrepreneurship. Although past research has broadly studied the three conceptual model concepts individually, these findings offer new insights into the multi-level combined effects in the transition economy ecosystem context while also potentially applying to other emerging EEs in various states of evolution. The paper concludes with directions for future research to better understand the unique entrepreneurial challenges in these regions. Keywords: Entrepreneurial ecosystem, Entrepreneur support processes, Productive entrepreneurship, Top- down, Stakeholder alignment, Mindset, Sociocultural, Transition economy 1 Introduction The Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (EE) is an approach to understanding and theorizing the context and contributing components leading to Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) establishment and productive entrepreneurship within communities (Amezcua et al., 2020; Antony et al., 2017; Fernandes and Ferreira, 2022; Hakala et al., 2020; Spigel, 2020). Prior research shows that functioning EEs can be essential to new SME creation (Maroufkhani et al., 2018; O’Connor et al.,