Entrepreneurship as Empowerment: Knowledge Spillovers and Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Entrepreneurship is a form of empowerment as it provides a way for individuals to pursue their dreams. The generation of ideas is at the heart of entrepreneurship and involves assessing new opportunities. Recognizing gaps in the marketplace that new products, services or processes can fill is central to the idea of entrepreneurship. There are many different types of entrepreneurship including social, technological, sport and international that provide a way for ideas to enter the marketplace. This chapter focuses on the way entrepreneurship empowers people and provides a way for novel ideas to gain momentum. By taking a knowledge spillover and ecosystems perspective, the chapter highlights the way entrepreneurship gives strength to those with a creative idea. Thereby, acting as a form of empowerment, entrepreneurship provides a way for practitioners and researchers to make a positive contribution to society.

In this chapter, the author explore the role of entrepreneurial ecosystems in terms of focusing on the importance of accelerators. Entrepreneurship is crucial for the ongoing success of accelerators but seldom has research focused on the ecosystem perspective. Organizations habitually use their contacts and networks to facilitate business growth through being included in accelerator programs. This means that comprehending how different entities are embedded in an entrepreneurial ecosystem can provide learning benefits. In the ecosystem literature, the role of accelerators has mainly been studied from the individual and firm-level demonstrating the relationship between entrepreneurial behavior and firm performance but there is more need to emphasis the role accelerators play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Suggestions for managers involved in entrepreneurial ecosystems are suggested in this chapter as a way of encouraging more involvement in accelerator programs.

The examination researches the impacts of cultural identity on entrepreneurial performance in the southern Nigeria. The examination connected a cross-sectional overview approach in choosing the small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) in south-south district who reacted to an organized poll. The Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM 3.2) were utilized in analyzing. The examinations show that there is an association between family structure, communal spirit and entrepreneurial performance. Nevertheless, there is a weak connection among individualism orientation, profitability and survival. The examination reasoned that SMEs could raise performance by embracing significant antecedents of cultural identity from successful cultural groups.

Entrepreneurship has an important role in the economic development of a country. One element that represents the entrepreneurship quality is its orientation. The orientation of entrepreneurship includes several dimensions which are needed for achievement, an internal locus of control, self-reliance, extroversion, being proactive, risk-taking, and innovation. These dimensions are believed to be able to improve the company’s performance. The purpose of this study is to find out how the entrepreneurship orientation influences the firm performance. This study aims to discover which dimensions of entrepreneurship orientation are the most influential toward the firm performance. The samples were comprised 40 entrepreneurs. The primary data were collected from the respondents by distributing questionnaires to the entrepreneurs of food firms in Salatiga, Indonesia. A multiple regression analysis method was applied in this study. The results show that among the dimensions in entrepreneurship orientation, only the risk-taking and innovative dimensions influence the company’s performance. Innovativeness has a higher effect on firm performance.

Sports clubs are one of the most important elements in the sports systems of today’s societies. In the field of sport, a sports club aims, among other things, to make the sport more affordable and accessible to all, showing the organizational characteristics of companies, but with a much broader social mission. The aim of this chapter is to characterise sports clubs as potentially favorable environments for sports entrepreneurship, making questions about their nature and purposes. Aspects such as the hybridization of organizations, the progressive professionalisation of their members, the use of the entrepreneurial spirit as an instrument to facilitate the achievement of the organisation’s objectives or the need to seek alternative sources of funding to traditional public aid are discussed in the context of increasingly hostile and competitive environments, where social organizations must seek out resources in a similar way to companies.

Small traditional industry has been recognized as an important local economy that support cultural industry and is significant in many parts of the world, particularly in developing countries. The significance of this type industry as a poverty barrier, enables jobs for local rural villagers, and their role in continuing local community based cultural activities have become obvious. However, as the current modern days global pressures affecting many traditional people in developing countries, pathways of small traditional industry toward local sustainable development remain unclear. Further continuous investigations are still required on how this industry provide the platform for greater local, regional and global sustainability. Literatures and debates on the sustainability of the rural developing country concerning small traditional industries may even begin from the establishment of Brundtland sustainability commission in 1987. The conflict between brown and green agenda in Brundtland commission may also point to small-scale traditional industry growth in the developing world. Cultural traditional industries in developing countries could better lead to local sustainability pathway. On the other hand, conflict of the use of natural resources and competition may create different stories. How traditional industry in developing country survive and further innovate for development is a significant knowledge to understand. This chapter uses Jepara traditional furniture industry in Central Java – Indonesia which has been the subject of prolonged study on how small-scale industry implicated to global competition and pressures of raw material resources decline. This chapter further reviews previous research and recent study on Jepara industry upgrade and innovation, and how likely innovation may prosper for the future sustainability of this type of industry.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a viewpoint on the importance of liberalization for the development of service economy. This study of the authors results from the conducted research and experience obtained so far in the field of liberalization of the services market and its effects on Polish service enterprises. In addition, it contains practical insights on the liberalization, taking into consideration the benefits and barriers perceived by Polish service enterprises entering the markets of Central and Eastern Europe countries (CEEC) and for the economy. This chapter provides insight for the researchers and practitioners who are interested in the problematic of the liberalization of the services market in the context of managing a company operating in the CEEC area.

Start-ups are a new form of business venture that has quickly revolutionized the sport industry due to their ability to quickly develop ideas into commercial entities. Generally, most discussion about start-ups tends to take a collective view without considering the industry context. In this chapter, the author discuss how the sport industry is a unique form of start-up that is quickly gaining traction in the global sport industry. The reasons and advantages of sport start-ups are examined in terms of the existing literature and practice around nascent ventures. The crucial need for social capital and networks in developing sport start-ups is stated, which highlights the importance of analyzing start-ups from a sport industry perspective. In addition, the role of strategy and innovation in pursuing a start-ups mentality is progressed. This helps to provide an overview about the current practice of sport start-ups and to predict future developments.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the experiences of air passengers in the airside setting of commercial airports. Whilst the concept of liminality has found increased interest in tourism studies, only few studies have contextualized the airside experience as a liminal one. We investigate the role of food and beverage (F&B) consumption in this context as well as factors influencing F&B outlet patronage intentions. Using a European non-hub commercial airport as practical unit, we applied a mixed methods single case-study methodology to investigate F&B outlet choice in the airside setting. It becomes evident that perceptions of liminality play an important role in this context. Findings support the claim that the airport environment constitutes a special context, an encapsuled or protected space; not only for passengers, but also for employees alike. Whilst airports have a certain uniformity to regular travelers, infrequent travelers perceive air travel as an extraordinary activity, often paired with a certain uncertainty about related procedures. Evidence suggests that passengers’ emotional states play a key role in consumption decisions. Depending on travel purpose and direction, passengers showed differing consumption behaviors.

Understanding the airport airside area as a liminoid space and using the concept of boundary work for the transition between home and work realms (and back again) thus serves as a suitable frame of reference to help understand the phenomena that were observed and analyzed in this study. F&B consumption can then be understood to support the mental transition between home and work realms. Our findings thus allow linking the passenger clusters’ different consumption behavior to prevailing emotional states in their transgressions between work and home realm in the liminoid airside context.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems are fundamental to the functioning of an effective international business system that thrives on value creation. Despite the popularity of the term “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” its origins can be traced back to much of the research surrounding the effects of internationalization on the business environment. In the past 20 years, there has been many changes in the ability of businesses to market their services to consumers in other countries. This has largely been the result of technological innovation in the form of mobile commerce. At the same time, there has been a rise in the number of tourists traveling overseas. Both of these factors have led to the spread of ideas rapidly between countries thereby encouraging an entrepreneurial ecosystem to develop. Whilst much research has been conducted on the effects of internationalization on the economy, there is a shortage of research linking entrepreneurial ecosystems to internationalization effects. For this reason, this chapter is a timely one and an important milestone in the research on entrepreneurial ecosystems. This chapter will discuss the ways to create a conducive entrepreneurial ecosystem by taking into account culture and societal expectations, which leads to a discussion on managerial and policy implications together with future research suggestions.