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The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize business incubators and their support for entrepreneurial refugees. While the number of initiatives supporting refugees’ entrepreneurial activities has increased in recent years, we still know little about how they differ from other types of business incubators.

This case study investigates a business incubator in Hamburg, Germany, targeting enterprising refugees. For this paper, 14 in-depth interviews with program participants and incubation managers were conducted.

This paper inductively derives five functional domains of refugee business incubators: providing structured entrepreneurial knowledge; alleviating anxiety related to institutional differences; guiding through the process at the incubator and motivating participants; understanding and tapping into social capital in the host country; and providing soft support concerning personal matters. The findings show that business incubators could and possibly should address specific needs of refugees and that there is much room for improvement. This study suggests that the five domains listed above represent key characteristics that distinguish refugee business incubators from traditional business incubators.

This paper offers valuable practical insights for refugee business incubators, which need to consider and develop functional domains listed above. Because these kinds of incubators are a fairly recent phenomenon, there is a general lack of and need for blueprints. The findings of this paper suggest that business incubators could integrate and support entrepreneurial refugees provided that they consider the five functional domains identified here. The findings also provide evidence that entrepreneurship can be a possible means of vocational integration for refugees and one way of institutions and policy-makers in host country seeking to support refugees’ entrepreneurial activities, for example, by developing or subsidizing business incubators targeting refugees.

This paper’s contributions are twofold. First, this paper addresses a gap in the literature on refugee entrepreneurship by providing insights concerning the important role of support institutions. Second, this paper conceptualizes business incubators for enterprising refugees as a distinctive type of business incubators. This paper has, however, some limitations. Because it only considered a relatively small number of refugee entrepreneurs, it is difficult to generalize the findings. The cross-cultural setting of the empirical study, with its potential for linguistic and cultural misunderstandings, may have affected the results.

This study aims to explore expectation gaps concerning the roles between educators and students in the context of venture creation courses at higher education institutions by investigating their mutual perspectives. The authors seek to answer the following research questions: (1) how is the role expectation toward the entrepreneurship education of teachers different from that of students and (2) what are the consequences of these expectation gaps in entrepreneurship education?

This study applies an explorative qualitative approach. As the research setting, the authors selected an entrepreneurship education course for advanced management students at a German public university. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with both educators and students to examine how role ambiguity emerges in venture creation courses.

This study identified discrepancies between educators and students in their fundamental assumptions regarding the role of educators and students. Such discrepancies are the autonomy-level assumption gap, capacity assumption gap and learning outcomes expectation gap. Based on the findings, this study develops a framework of expectation gaps between educators and students as sources for role ambiguity in entrepreneurship education by extending the role episode model developed in role theory.

The findings contribute to the extant literature on entrepreneurship education in several ways. First, this study reveals that students in venture creation programs can encounter role ambiguity due to differing expectations about their role between educators and students, which can negatively affect the students' perception of their learning outcome. Second, this study discovered that the possible discrepancies regarding the fundamental assumptions about the role of educators and students pose a challenge to educators. Third, the findings illuminate the importance of understanding the complex identity of students in the context of student-centered entrepreneurship education.

This study offers several practical implications for entrepreneurship educators in higher education institutions. First, this study reveals the confusion among students concerning their role in entrepreneurship education. As such, it is recommended that educators explain to students the purpose of the student-centered pedagogical approach and the expected role of students in acting as independent entrepreneurial agents. Second, while student-centered entrepreneurship education is based on the fundamental assumption that students are motivated to develop their own startup projects, educators must consider the nature of students' motivation and their overall student-life situation. Finally, this study demonstrates the importance of creating an active feedback loop so that entrepreneurship teachers can be aware of such perceptional gaps between educators and students and understand the sources of these gaps.

While the extant literature indicates the existence of perceptual gaps between educators and students in the context of entrepreneurship education, how these gaps emerge and influence the outcome of entrepreneurship education remained unclear. One critical reason for the under-investigation of this issue was that existing studies predominantly emphasize the educators' perspectives, although such expectation gaps can only emerge through the discrepant views of two different parties. This study tackled this research gap by considering the mutual perspective of educators and students by applying role theory.

This study aims to explore the intention–behavior gap of student entrepreneurs who develop entrepreneurial intention in a venture creation course and decide to continue working on the business idea after completing the course. While many students decide to work on business concepts, they often struggle with taking further steps when the course ends. This suggests that the development of entrepreneurial intention in the course does not directly lead to entrepreneurial actions after the course. Hence, this paper examines the sources for the intention–action gap and behavioral responses of student entrepreneurs.

This study applied a systematic inductive qualitative research method to examine how student entrepreneurs encounter challenges after the entrepreneurship program and how they respond to them. The authors selected a venture development course at a German public university as their research context.

The findings revealed that students encountered substantial challenges after the program, which invoked their procrastinating behaviors. Based on the findings, this study developed a process model of the intention–behavior gap in student entrepreneurship. The process model provides a roadmap to follow the main findings, which consist of three main parts: (1) the antecedents of the intention–behavior gap; (2) behavioral responses of student entrepreneurs and (3) the outcomes of procrastination.

This study contributes to the emerging student entrepreneurship literature by identifying obstacles for students who intend to continue developing a venture after attending venture creation courses, as well as elaborating on possible student responses to these barriers and their subsequent impact on their nascent ventures. Furthermore, the findings contribute to developing the understanding of the intention–behavior gap in entrepreneurship education at higher education institutions by highlighting challenges for students that emerge in the transition phase from course participants to autonomous entrepreneurial actors.

Scholars have generally emphasized the vital role of entrepreneurship education in developing the entrepreneurial intentions of students as prospective entrepreneurs. However, researchers have only rarely examined how these intentions are translated into actions. Furthermore, the existing research on students' intention–behavior gap is limited to quantitative studies that demonstrate the existence of the gap empirically or apply theoretically derived moderators to their analysis. Consequently, the literature calls for more qualitative, explorative research approaches to understand what happens to students' entrepreneurial intentions once their entrepreneurship program is over.

The world is currently facing one of the most significant refugee crises in history, posing challenges to policymakers in host countries needing to facilitate socio-economic integration of refugees urgently. Policymakers and scholars have started shedding light on the entrepreneurial potential of refugees. Refugees confront considerable institutional barriers in their new environments. Particularly challenging is that they lose connection to their home country ecosystem through forced displacement and are not yet well-embedded in the local entrepreneurial ecosystem of the host country. The disconnection to the local ecosystem hinders refugees from accessing various resources essential to entrepreneurial activities. Against this background, this chapter illuminates the role of business incubators in integrating refugee entrepreneurs into the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, paying particular attention to relational dynamics within incubators. This study conducts explorative qualitative research with a single case study of a German business incubator for refugees. This study identifies three types of relational dynamics that characterise operation of refugee business incubators and two mechanisms constructive and descriptive to their mission. Finally, this study derives practical implications for refugee business incubators and policymakers in refugee-hosting countries.

The purpose of this study is to present how a German-origin diaspora entrepreneur successfully introduces a new concept to Uzbekistan by orchestrating diaspora and local resources into a transnational diaspora venture, a kind of international new venture. Diaspora entrepreneurs can act as catalysts for market entry of innovations as they possess unique perspectives and competencies. Thus, the study increases the understanding of transnational diaspora entrepreneurship.

A single embedded case study supported with ethnographic methods was employed. The explorative strategy assisted to discover ways how the entrepreneur succeeded in entering this difficult market with a totally novel concept.

Perceived opportunity triggered the migration of the entrepreneur. Her transnational entrepreneurial competences and perspectives together with an efficient usage of various network resources in host and home country enabled a successful entry of the new venture as opposed to normal entry barriers. The study illustrates how diaspora effects can be employed for right timing and achieving first-mover advantages in diffusion of innovation and market entry.

The study contributes to the emerging stream of research on transnational diaspora entrepreneurship and introduces a unique “rich-to-emerging” diaspora venture entry in a transition economy. This is among the first catalyst cases that provide implications for the organization of entry process, diaspora entrepreneurship, and management. It represents a new form of international new ventures that succeeded where big players like Starbucks and McDonalds did not.