Abstract: Starting a new business to initiate a new industry is a key hallmark of entrepreneurship. Exploring the entrepreneurial phenomenon in emerging industries is essential for understanding both the entrepreneurial behavior and decision-making logic of new ventures and the formation patterns of emerging industries. Although the existing literature has extensively explored entrepreneurship in emerging industries, no systematic review has been conducted so far. Emerging industries represent a unique, even extreme entrepreneurial context. A systematic review of entrepreneurship researches concerning emerging industry contexts for the purpose of identifying important research themes and their research threads, can significantly contribute to the knowledge of entrepreneurship research in general settings. Given this, this paper first defines the connotation and characteristics of an emerging industry; next employs the systematic literature research method to search, select and code the literature on new venture entrepreneurial behaviors in emerging industries, thus identifying four prominent themes, i.e., strategy, legitimacy, entrepreneurial opportunity and identity; then constructs an integrated research framework and conducts a comparative analysis to clarify the distinctive value of entrepreneurship research in emerging industries; and finally proposes future research prospects for promoting the progress of entrepreneurship research in emerging industry.

Key words: emerging industry, entrepreneurship research, prominent themes, research prospects