Entrepreneurship & Regional Development

We investigated the relationship between employment growth and profitability and propose that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) hire employees, they experience an increase in profitability due to their acquisition of additional human capital. These benefits, however, are limited by the firm’s ability to efficiently integrate the newly recruited employees and adjust its internal managerial...

Entrepreneurship Education (EE) programmes world-wide serve a highly standardized menu of activities for student consumption, such as pitching exercises, competitions and mini-companies. This situation has been called the McDonaldization of EE, where standard activities are adopted globally. In this paper we study the influence of Junior Achievement (JA) – the ‘original burger’ – to draw...

Realizing cultural diversity’s impact on regional entrepreneurial activity has become crucial for scholars and policymakers. As a step in this direction, this study integrates insights from creative cognitive psychology and the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to examine this effect and the boundary conditions explaining it. Based on a six-year multi-sourced panel dataset for the...

Entrepreneurial identities have a significant influence on new venture emergence. Yet, an entrepreneur’s (meaning-constructing) interpretive engagement with situations such as entrepreneurial opportunities remain relatively unexplained. This paper explores how entrepreneurs’ personal identities influence their interpretive engagement with entrepreneurial opportunities. We presented 34 entrepreneur...

Family is the most important, yet under researched, dimension in family business research. Following recent calls in Entrepreneurship-as-Practice, we bring a practice-based approach to family business research to understand next generation engagement over extended periods in family life. Drawing on a culinary family business’s three published cookbooks, theorized as ‘discursive artefacts’, we exam...

Despite contributing to host country economies, there is limited examination of self-employed female immigrants in the literature. While human, social, and financial capital are important for entrepreneurship in general, given immigrant women’s intersectional identities, the potential exists for these factors to affect them differently. This study uses US data obtained from Integrated Public Use M...

The Gulf States have dedicated much attention and many resources to entrepreneurship, particularly in supporting women entrepreneurship. These efforts are reflected in the increase in research focused on women entrepreneurs in the Gulf States. The vast majority of relevant studies have explored the reasons for the low engagement of women in the economic sphere. Recent...

The emergence of digital technologies is transforming entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. This creates a plethora of research questions at the intersection of digital technologies and entrepreneurship. A key question is if existing entrepreneurial models are applicable to understanding digital entrepreneurship. In this study we provide novel insights by exploring the following research questio...

The barefoot entrepreneurship literature rarely acknowledges the role of space in the development of informal economic activities. However, the concept of liminal space, defined as a place of transition and largely discussed in geography, can provide a new conceptual lens through which the trajectories of barefoot entrepreneurs can be viewed. This interdisciplinary research leverages this...

In times of crisis, SME entrepreneurs refresh and replace corporate resources and capabilities in the strategic renewal processes to sustain organizational resilience. Appearing in the form of internal development and external sourcing, the strategic renewal outcomes are explained by the synergy of individual, organizational and environmental-level factors that build up SMEs’ dynamic capabilities....

Family background matters for entrepreneurship, but why do siblings differ in their propensity to become entrepreneurs and the type of ventures they pursue? I draw on family socialization and resource allocation theories to develop hypotheses about the differential effects of family structure – comprising birth order, family size, and sibling gender – on (growth-oriented) entrepreneurship....

We explore how digitalization impacts young firms’ growth. A longitudinal panel analysis of the EU’s new ventures during 2010–2018 reveals that digital sectoral capabilities affect young firms’ growth autonomously and via interaction with other sectoral capabilities. Digital sectoral capabilities play an important complementary role in facilitating the upscaling of young firms operating in R&D...

Research has shown that social enterprises must constantly balance conflicting demands between their social and economic goals. However, little is known about the factors that shape managers’ strategic choices in response to the tensions associated with social enterprises’ hybrid nature. To address this issue, we conducted a case study analysis of six work integration social...

We conducted a field experiment in Burkina Faso to investigate the impact of informal sharing obligations within kin networks on entrepreneurial effort. Tailors were incentivized to produce bags and our treatment intervention was to subtly inform tailors’ families about this income opportunity. We expected that informing the family should lead to an average decrease in...

Practicing entrepreneurship is important for entrepreneurial learning in institutionalized education. However, research is attentive to how this challenges conventional learning arrangements and requires teachers and students to change familiar ways of relating and participating. In this study, we investigate the landscape of participation in a case of experiential entrepreneurship education for n...

In response to strong revenue and income losses facing a large share of self-employed individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency-aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the impact of this program on the confidence to survive the crisis. We investigate how...

Through the qualitative analysis of 81 semi-structured interviews of academics from the STEM fields, working in UK, Australia, and Italy, we support and challenge the previous literature on academic entrepreneurship. On the one hand, our research supports previous studies which suggest that some academics find compatibility between their academic roles and forms of science commercialization...

This study aims to understand the complex mechanisms of entrepreneurship in context and explores the entrepreneurial identities and experiences of women entrepreneurs in relation to opportunity structures in Turkey. Turkey’s position at the boundary of Western and Middle Eastern geographies and cultures presents a compelling context for the study of women’s entrepreneurship. Drawing on life-story....

As social entrepreneurship gains maturity, research has begun to explore the less alluring aspects of the field, including the heroic stance of social entrepreneurs, the assumed moral superiority of their intentions, and the misleading emphasis on solutionism. In this paper, we explore a central component of this criticism, which is the construction of un-realistic venture...

Has the Mittelstand lost its charisma? Based on a corpus of newspaper articles, we use a multi-dimensional approach combining content, framing, and metaphor analysis to expose how media report about the digital transformation in the German Mittelstand. In terms of contents, media focus on technical issues, narrowing down the scope of digital transformation. Articles with...

Technostress is an important by-product of information and communication technologies (ICT). The technostress literature suggests focusing on specific dimensions of technostress, such as techno-overload, which describes when ICT usage demands to work faster and longer. However, only a few studies have dealt with the technostress of small business owners, let alone techno-overload. This is surprisi...

How does the grand challenge of refugees influence nascent entrepreneurs in host countries? To explore this question, we build on social identity theory and analyse how the 2015 European refugee event is related to the strength of different founder social identities (i.e. Darwinian, Communitarian, and Missionary founder social identities) of nascent entrepreneurs in the countries...

Identity work, the process through which entrepreneurs create a coherent and distinctive identity for themselves and their businesses, constitutes an important source of legitimacy. Yet while the ongoing social and spatial contexts in which entrepreneurs operate are increasingly viewed as critical contingencies for understanding their identity work, historical context is largely neglected. We focu...

The development of a nation or a region depends on saving existing businesses as much as on creating new ones. Small business orientation theories suggest that small business owners’ long-term commitment may contribute to the robustness of their venture. Our study further investigates the relationship between small business owners’ affective, continuance and normative commitment and...

This paper introduces and discusses the concept of animatorship in relation to rural enterprise and development. At its simplest level, animatorship is the art of animating others to achieve their objectives. We develop and apply this concept to understanding community development and community enterprise, with a specific emphasis on rural communities. We present a descriptive,...