Strategic Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Business Model Innovation

The time is right for a theory on strategic entrepreneurial ecosystems and business model innovation. Both topics have increased substantially during the past couple of years due to their strategic nature. This means they are uniquely placed to provide practical advice but also theoretical development. This chapter discusses the theory in terms of how it bridges strategic planning, innovation management, and entrepreneurship literature. Thereby propelling the field of entrepreneurial ecosystems further by suggesting it has both a strategic and business model perspective. This chapter argues the reasons for a new theory to be developed in order to maintain the relevance and practicality of the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature.

Entrepreneurship has been one of the major pillars in our economy around the world. Aside from the aspiring and innovative entrepreneurs looking for like-minded collaborators to start new ventures that disrupt the business world, managers are increasingly looking for entrepreneurial graduates to tackle the ever-changing business landscape. There has been increasing consensus that entrepreneurship is not limited to being an attitude or a certain characteristic that one is born with, but a skill that can be developed through education. This can be seen in the sprung of entrepreneurship programs in various educational institutions, as well as dedicated entrepreneurship degrees in higher education. However, the information that each person is receiving can vary depending on their environment, and how they perceive and process the information can also be different. In addition, propensity to take actions to pursue the identified opportunities can also vary. Thus, how can the governments and universities work together in breeding the next generation of entrepreneurs? To answer our research question, we sampled 191 undergraduate students in a private university in Malaysia. We examined the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, and entrepreneurial intention. Our findings contribute to future research with a more refined understanding of the factors affecting entrepreneurial intention, as well as practical implications for governments and higher education institutions on how they form an ecosystem in equipping future generations with entrepreneurialism.

This chapter gives an overview on the importance of business innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic with a special reference to Brunei Darussalam. It also highlights the important role of technology and digitalization of businesses. Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) have been the backbone of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economy, thus innovative strategies are required to assist them in during the pandemic. The information obtained is based on observation and secondary sources. Despite businesses struggling to stay afloat as a result of movement restriction orders and partial lockdown, new startups were created as a result of addressing a specific problem during the pandemic which requires entrepreneurs to be more innovative and proactive. However, being innovative should not be focused on businesses only. As maintaining positive cash flow is the main issue among MSMEs, a financial innovation to assist MSMEs should be explored, learning from the experience of Islamic banking and finance during global financial crisis. This chapter also suggests future studies, for instance exploring a resilient and adaptable business model during economic uncertainties, the important role of Islamic financial technology and financial digital economy which could help to empower both startups and MSMEs.

The aim of this chapter is to contribute toward the phenomena of women entrepreneurship from an emerging economy perspective through a dynamic capability's perspective. The challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in a nonsupportive entrepreneurial ecosystem reshaped by digitization will contribute to the burgeoning women entrepreneurship literature. In order to survive in a challenging entrepreneurial ecosystem, women entrepreneurs need dynamic capabilities to face the challenges of a modern digital world. This chapter problematizes the challenges of the digital world and its role in modern day businesses.

Culture and economic settings are often perceived as key influential elements in formulating the entrepreneurial ecosystem, either on the organizations level or the entire social system. In their different forms, culture and economic conditions have always been critical drivers for innovation and entrepreneurship. Understanding the community's cultural traits and economic status helps entrepreneurs map their entrepreneurial objectives and define enablers and deterrents. This chapter investigated the cultural and economic environment within the Gulf Council Countries (GCC), mapped their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices and entrepreneurial performance. It was evident that some cultural traits, such as tribalism, could play an adverse role in supporting entrepreneurship. However, the economic system, which mainly relies on oil and gas production, could be the best enabler for entrepreneurship, which has a unique nature in the GCC and receives high government reinforcement through massive capital surpluses generated from the oil revenue. The latest statistics ranking the global entrepreneurship performance indicated that the GCC lay in the middle area among other countries worldwide. Qatar came on the top of the GCC with a global rank of 22, while Saudi Arabia came last, at position 45 globally. The government legislative and economic support for entrepreneurship activities contributes to preparing a proper authoritative climate that promotes entrepreneurship and could be a golden opportunity for entrepreneurs in the GCC.

There is an increasing interest in the literature for the characteristics of the entrepreneurial ecosystems and the impacts caused by their activities. Silicon Valley or Israel is widely known as the main entrepreneurial ecosystems, but there are a lot of different cities and countries which are performing a great effort to become a worldwide reference in entrepreneurship. The purpose of this work is to analyze the Spanish and the Portuguese entrepreneurial ecosystems and identify strengths and challenges. The basic characteristics of both countries will be introduced, as well as the relevant points regarding policies for fostering entrepreneurship, tax benefits to entrepreneurial activities, special considerations for social enterprises, investors support and the main challenges faced by each country.

This chapter aims to explore and describe the composition of newly formed entrepreneurial teams, working relationships among their members, and perception of self-performance at each stage of the business incubation process. The research follows a qualitative approach that involves semi-structured interviews of members from entrepreneurial teams at different stages of business development. Findings show the team composition is an important element and how these changes as the team progress through business incubation stages. Relationships between members change from informal to professional with more defined roles. The perception of the business incubator's effect on the team decreases as the maturity stages advance. On the contrary, each member's perceived expectations are deemed to be higher at the beginning of the project. This research contributes to the knowledge of the dynamics of the entrepreneurial teams and their needs at each stage of business incubation.

Classic education is mainly marked by what experts dubbed as “Cartesian dualism,” which punctuates the rational planning (mind) should subordinate emotions (body). In tourism education, Cartesian dualism occupies a central position populating in the academic curricula. Of course, over the recent years, some voices have alerted on the problems of tourism education in training the new tourism staff. Pregraduate students are often subject to excessive working hours, low-paid salaries without mentioning the lack of answers to respond to the global risks the industry often faces. This suggests that classic tourism education should be at least revisited. PANCOE is a successful experiment with basis on Joy Labs (University of Palermo, Argentina) that combines pleasurable techniques and practices to stimulate students’ academic performance while reducing drop-out rates. PANCOE alternates with digital technologies, smelling and tasting dishes, to enhance creativity and entrepreneurship. Originally designed to be applied to foreign students coming from neighboring countries who live alone in Buenos Aires, PANCOE shows promising results to be conducted over psychologically deprived students. Lastly, PANCOE centers efforts in consolidating local food heritage while cooking local dishes or baking pieces of bread or cookies where students come from.

The main purpose of this study is to see the effects of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on a firm's innovation performance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The objective of this study is twofold: First, it aims to analyze the impact of ICT applications on firms' innovative behavior and whether firms using ICT applications more intensively are also more innovative. Second, and more essentially, it assesses empirically the impact of ICT applications on firms' innovative performance in sub-Saharan African countries by using instrumental variable probit model. Therefore, we used data from the 2013 enterprise survey (Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS)). According to our results, the most important ICT tools are emails and using the internet for online sales. Firms who have IT Teams are not creating any difference; however, if a firm purchase or develop in-house any software then they are more likely to produce innovation than the other firms.

This study focuses on the impact of internal factors, namely intrinsic motivation, ICT knowledge, and the moderating effect of demographic factors such as education level, age, gender on digital readiness of Indonesian MSMEs.

The sample data selected in this study include owners of culinary SMEs in the Salatiga area, Central Java, and who already has had a building to run their business. This study employed a quantitative approach using a statistical package to perform descriptive and inferential analyses with the help of IBM SPSS and Smart PLS.

Four hypotheses have been formulated and tested using the structured equation model. The results revealed that intrinsic motivation and ICT knowledge have a positive significant influence on the digital readiness of MSMEs.

The study concluded that the internal encouragement of the culinary MSME owners in the city of Salatiga will continue to advance and develop following the current digital technology era.

The results from the moderation testing show that women have a slightly higher average answer than men in the number of indicators of intrinsic motivation and in the number of indicators of digital readiness.

Micro Small Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia benefit from the digital era. It is important to apply digitalization in the Indonesian MSMEs so that they can develop and compete with other countries, and digital readiness is one of the key successes in the global competition.