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Entrepreneurs interact with others and, through this, benefit from access to knowledge, resources and skills that enhance their own entrepreneurial and organizational capabilities. This paper aims to contribute to the literature interested in identifying and analyzing important antecedents of entrepreneurs’ choices regarding social relations. The study shows how the venture stage, innovativeness and internationalization of the firm potentially influence entrepreneurial choices regarding their social sources of advice.

The analysis is based on cross-sectional survey data for the years 2009 and 2010, involving 13 Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. Respondents include future prospective entrepreneurs, start-ups and owner-managers of operating businesses, a total of 13,251 respondents across all countries for the entire period.

Entrepreneurs with innovative ventures draw more on advice sources that are able to give information useful for the commercialization of innovative products, and entrepreneurs of internationally exposed ventures rely on a broad base of advice sources that can connect them with a foreign market. However, the outcomes regarding the impact of “different venture stages” point to social interaction patterns that are strongly influenced by local culture and that do not support the assumption of universal entrepreneurship behavior. This study shows that social interactions decline in quantity the more as the venture progresses in age. However, the type of social interaction (e.g. private or professional sources) that entrepreneurs engage throughout the different venture stages remains essentially the same and does not change across different entrepreneurial phases. In the MENA sample, private relations remain the most important source of advice throughout all phases, and they are not replaced by other contacts.

Limitations of this paper refer to the use of a large-scale database that cannot address certain issues without more direct observation, such as the quality of different social relations. Future research could address this issue by offering more fine-grained items for the different advice sources.

The paper contributes to the debate on whether entrepreneurship is universal in nature. It focuses on data from emerging and developing countries in the Arab world, which is has not been studied very much in the entrepreneurship literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the combined roles via trust relationships of the two technology cores of the firm: information technology (IT) and R&D and their impact on new product success.

A model was tested whereby trust and the integrated IT strategy account for a significant amount of the variance in a broad range of new product development (NPD) outcomes for a survey sample of 223 manufacturing firms. Respondents said design practices and quality methods like Six Sigma accounted for a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective NPD. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success.

Respondents reported that a total of over 25 percent of the reports of the most helpful approaches in promoting effective included these quality methods. At the same time their biggest challenges were having a clear strategic direction within which to operate and resolving cost and resource issues which accounted for over a third (34 percent) of barriers to success. High-tech firms were less likely to report integrated IT strategies, but this tended to be counterbalanced by high levels of trust in the IT function and adoption of organizational innovations for execution of strategic intent. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Survey methods produce broad results with low response rates in most studies involving R&D and NPD, and this study is no exception.

With the challenge of strategy alignment reported by many of these firms, it seems clear that the top management team cannot afford to leave NPD challenges to engineering teams and NPD programs without guidance and general vision.

NPD has become the staple of most manufacturing firms as a way of meeting and beating the competition worldwide. However, trust between functional areas often starts before people are even employed and should begin in training and educational programs.

Designing NPD programs is at the heart of many firms’ competitive strategies and the fast learning companies are the winners. Very little is known about the trust relationship between IT and R&D and their combined effects on new product success which we have found to be significant and unexpected in their impacts.

Book review by William H. A. Johnson. Casson, Mark et al., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Entrepreneurship, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 9780199288984

Outlines the technological problems which make it hard to deliver high quality video over the internet, e.g. insufficient bandwidth, clients’ machines etc.; and considers how they might be solved. Describes how digital video, audio presentations and animations can be streamed to a computer and the ways in which various US sectors are actually using streaming media at the moment. Discusses the future for multimedia applications in corporate training, e‐business and higher education; and predicts they will be very widely used as the technology improves.

This study aims to predict popular contributors through text representations of user-generated content in open crowds.

Three text representation approaches – count vector, Tf-Idf vector, word embedding and supervised machine learning techniques – are used to generate popular contributor predictions.

The results of the experiments demonstrate that popular contributor predictions are considered successful. The F1 scores are all higher than the baseline model. Popular contributors in open crowds can be predicted through user-generated content.

This research presents brand new empirical evidence drawn from text representations of user-generated content that reveals why some contributors' ideas are more viral than others in open crowds.

This research suggests that companies can learn from popular contributors in ways that help them improve customer agility and better satisfy customers' needs. In addition to boosting customer engagement and triggering discussion, popular contributors' ideas provide insights into the latest trends and customer preferences. The results of this study will benefit marketing strategy, new product development, customer agility and management of information systems.

The paper provides new empirical evidence for popular contributor prediction in an innovation crowd through text representation approaches.

The lack of clarity in defining data science is problematic in both academia and industry because the former has a need for clarity to establish curriculum guidelines in their work to prepare future professionals, and the latter has a need for information to establish clear job description guidelines to recruit professionals. This lack of clarity has resulted in job descriptions with significant overlap among different related professional groups. This study examines the industry view of five professions: statistical analysts (SAs), big data analytics professionals (BDAs), data scientists (DSs), data analysts (DAs) and business analytics professionals (BAs). The study compares the five fields with the unified backdrop of their common semantic dimensions and examines their recent dynamics.

1,200 job descriptions for the five Big Data professions (SA, DS, BDA, DA and BA) were pulled from the Monster website at four points in time, and a document library was created. The collected job qualification records were analyzed using the text analytic method of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSAs), which extract topics based on observed text usage patterns.

The findings indicated a good alignment between the industry view and the academic view of data science as a blend of statistical and programming skills. This industry view remained relatively stable during the 4 years of our study period.

This research paper builds upon a long tradition of related studies and commentaries. Rather than relying on subjective expertise, this study examined the job market and used text analytics to discern a space of skill and qualification dimensions from job announcements related to five big data professions.

The revitalization of big data has gained attention in the public sector. However, such open government data (OGD) is facing major challenges with respect to data quality and limited use. To solve this problem, this study analyzes the factors driving the use of OGD from the perspective of data providers in the public sector.

Using the analytic hierarchy process and analytic network process methodologies, the importance of the factors driving the use of big data in the public sector was ranked. In addition, the different characteristics of tasks among the departments in a public agency were compared based on expert interviews.

The factors driving OGD use are not only political environment or the technological environment. The importance of the institutional culture within the organization increases with the motivation of the data provider. The priorities of the OGD factors also depend on the objectives of the department involved.

This study provides implications for improving the publication of open data by analyzing the priorities of the factors driving its use from the perspective of big data providers. It focuses on different perceptions of the factors valued by public officials in charge of data in institutions. The results suggest the need to explore officials' perceptions of value creation in big data fields.

Although this article's objectives include providing a primer on internet business strategy and a design guide for future management development efforts, the motivating objective is to expose traditional business leaders to the need to shock the legacy mindset of their organizations so that they will remain competitive in the twenty‐first century.

Uses Lewin's three‐step change model – unfreeze, change, and refreeze, involving the IMPACT internet business simulation.

Just as information technology progress has been slowed by the need to integrate with legacy systems, the new business opportunities available on the internet have been slowed by the legacy mindsets of traditionally trained managers. These legacy mindsets have become systemic in the conversations and cultures of most traditional organizations. Thus, an established company's successful venture into the internet space will likely depend on a significant change in organizational culture.

Although this article was not developed to empirically explore the link between changed mindsets and organization success, some anecdotal evidence is offered that may motivate significant future research.

Through the use of business simulations new conversations can be introduced and the organization change process can be started. By detailing some of the design considerations in the development of the IMPACT internet business simulation, this article exposes management development professionals to the benefits of business simulations and the educational challenges presented by the internet.

The article challenges business leaders and management development professionals to look at the internet as a threat to their organizational culture. If managers want to prepare their organizations for the future, they are going to need tools such as business simulations to shock their organization's legacy mindsets.

The pace of organizational change has accelerated, competitive pressures have intensified, and most organizations are now forced to operate within much more complex environments than was the case a relatively few years ago. In the past, many organizations focused on vertical integration as a means of increasing control in uncertain environments and/or taking advantage of economies of scale. High volume was believed to be the key to success. Today, however, organizations are finding it less beneficial to own and operate a large number of factories or to employ a large number of people. Increased global competition has caused many organizations to realize that the key to competitiveness is not “high‐volume” but “high‐value.”