Innovation scholars have long recognized entrepreneurship is imitative', whereas the commercialization of novelty is innovative'. Thus they are highly distinctive skill-sets. Entrepreneurship, first, involves optimizing market sentiment for pure profit sometimes to the point of catastrophe and even fraudulence in many markets. These include: payment protection insurance (PPI) to flash crashes', automotive emission defeat devices', corporate bribery settlements, social media hacking', fake news' and a litany of other infractions and catastrophes. Innovation, by contrast, is more explorative and team-reliant. Even if patenting betrays the hope for commercialization on markets, patented innovation frequently fails. Some academic innovators even profess a preference for prizes over profits. Second, this means that collective bonding' among entrepreneurs, in the form of claimed entrepreneurial ecosystems', is often based on a single customer platform or as a supplier of a highly specialist type of imitative' service from identikit pizza chains to me-too' smartphone apps. Through the latter, fused with artificial intelligence some interactive machine-learning services have long-existed as postsocial' algorithms serving customers of, for example, investment banks in stock and currency markets. Finally, entrepreneurship is fundamentally competitive, individualistic and non-solidaristic, whereas open innovation' was born from the practices of open science' and the collegiate tradition of research. Accordingly, entrepreneurial ecosystems' can display more closure than RIS set-ups. This special issue explores aspects of these ecosystem platforms and their implications for emergent forms of urban and regional evolution in the near and nearly present future.