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The Environment Agency estimates that one in six homes in England (approximately 5.2m properties) are at risk from flooding and 185,000 commercial properties are located in flood-prone areas. Further, an estimate of 10,000 new homes are built on flood plains yearly. The UK has witnessed a significant increase in flood events over the past 10 years. During this period, there has been growing research attention into measures to mitigate the effects of flooding, including the benefits of deploying sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDs) in new developments or as a retrofit. The purpose of this paper is to present the development of a cost-benefit analysis model for the retrofit of SuDs focusing on the potential for improved flood risk mitigation in the context of commercial properties.

A synthesis of flood risk management and SuDs literature is used to inform the development of a conceptual cost-benefit analysis model for the retrofit of SuDs and focusing on the potential for improved flood risk mitigation in the context of commercial properties.

SuDs have been applied successfully in different parts of the world; however, the uptake of SuDs, in particular, the retrofit of SuDs, has been restricted by a number of issues including a lack of experience and trust in their performance and a lack of understanding in their true benefits. In particular, there is the limited experience of retrofitting SuDs and there are no well-established procedures for evaluating the feasibility, value or cost effectiveness of doing this.

This offers the potential to support the UK government’s flood risk management policy by helping to increase the resilience of properties, whilst offering other benefits to communities such as improvements in air quality and biodiversity and also presenting a clearer understanding of the monetary and non-monetary implication to owners of commercial properties for a more informed and acceptable uptake of SuDs retrofit.

The proposed model will allow a more comprehensive understanding of the costs and associated benefits associated with SuDs retrofit, highlighting the flood risk mitigation benefits that might accrue over a period of time for commercial property.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insight and analysis into E-commerce in China and how it has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society. Split into four distinct sections, the book first lays out the theoretical foundations and fundamental concepts of E-Business before moving on to look at internet+ innovation models and their applications in different industries such as agriculture, finance and commerce. The book then provides a comprehensive analysis of E-business platforms and their applications in China before finishing with four comprehensive case studies of major E-business projects, providing readers with successful examples of implementing E-Business entrepreneurship projects.

Internet + and Electronic Business in China is a comprehensive resource that provides insights and analysis into how E-commerce has revolutionized and continues to revolutionize business and society in China.

It is important to understand how recent regulation allowing small businesses to issue equity through crowdfunding can impact investors' decision-making. One unique feature of crowdfunding presented to investors is an issuer's fundraising goal (i.e., minimum target) and how much money has currently been pledged toward that goal by other investors. However, it is unknown whether investors are sensitive to the level at which the minimum target is set, which can influence the perception of the level of support an investment has received from other investors. While holding the amount of capital pledged to an issuer constant, we conduct an experiment to examine how the minimum level of an issuer's fundraising goal impacts the likelihood of investment by investors. We predict that lower minimum goals will facilitate a perception that an issuer has strong support from other investors and will lead to a change in how investors perceive that issuer. We find that, regardless of the financial strength of the issuer, lower minimum fundraising goals lead to greater investment likelihood compared to higher minimum fundraising goals. We also find that issuers with weak financial strength tend to benefit from this effect more than stronger firms. Finally, this effect is mediated by investors' perceptions of the support of other investors in the company. The results of our study have both practical and theoretical contributions.

Crowdfunding is a relatively new alternative method of raising capital for new ventures. In recent years, crowdfunding has also gained prominence within the food industry. On the basis of signaling theory, this study aims to analyze the success factors of vegan crowdfunding campaigns, which remains unexplored in academia.

This study employs a logistic regression analysis on a sample of 200 vegan crowdfunding campaigns launched in Europe between 2014 and 2021 on the popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.

The results show that the number of images, comments and updates as well as the readability of project descriptions positively impact the success rate of vegan crowdfunding campaigns. Furthermore, the length of the project description has a negative effect, whereas the number of videos has no bearing on the success of vegan crowdfunding campaigns.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study pioneers examining the success factors of vegan crowdfunding campaigns. This study enriches the literature in several ways. First, this study contributes to an open debate on the success factors of crowdfunding. Second, this study provides knowledge about the factors that can favor the success of vegan initiatives. Third, this study confirms the usefulness of signaling theory as a theoretical framework for understanding vegan crowdfunding.

This study explores entrepreneurial decision-making in the equity crowdfunding (ECF) context, and it aims to shed some light on the relationship among three aspects: entrepreneurial characteristics (i.e. entrepreneurial alertness and entrepreneurial self-efficacy), entrepreneurial motivations (i.e. promotion, improvement of networking and acquisition of product and market knowledge) and entrepreneurial behaviours (i.e. campaign characteristics in terms of communication and offerings).

The hypotheses testing and analysis were conducted using the partial least squares approach to structural equation modelling, and data were collected from the overall population of Italian ECF platforms.

Our results highlight that entrepreneurial characteristics may be central in ECF because of their significant impact on some motivation entrepreneurs have to adopt ECF, which in turn have an impact on meaningful campaign characteristics that can influence ECF performance.

The current literature is mainly focused on investors' decisions, while a neglected perspective until now has been that of entrepreneurs. This study is among the first to focus on entrepreneurs in the ECF context, and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first study to investigate the entrepreneurial decision-making process. The added value of this research lies in the analysis of the entrepreneurial aspects underlying entrepreneurial decisions to use ECF.

Entrepreneurship education thrives on the pillars of experiential education. Using the case of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, the purpose of this paper is to examine the entrepreneurship clinic (EC) as a viable pedagogy for the promotion of experiential education in entrepreneurship.

The paper relies on insider action research to analyse, within Joplin’s five-step model, the case of the EC at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana.

The analysis showed that the KNUST clinic comprises five main activities including preparation, orientation, selection and matching, coaching and monitoring and evaluation. In relation to Joplin’s five-step model, the first three stages of the clinic provide focus for the clinic while the remaining two stages – coaching and monitoring and evaluation – entail activities that are geared towards action, support, feedback and debrief. Through the clinic, thousands of tertiary students have been trained in entrepreneurship and new venture creation; some selected participants have been coached while others have had the opportunity to qualify for business incubation.

Although the paper discusses some achievements of the clinic in relation to enrolment and fundraising, it does not assess the impact of the clinic on the entrepreneurial competencies, intentions and initiatives of participants, hence, these issues are recommended for future research.

The paper demonstrates that it is feasible to implement the EC methodology, irrespective of the cost and time implications that are often associated with experiential educational methodologies. However, support from university management, funding raising from internal and external sources and technical support from industry and government agencies are key to the sustainability of clinics.

The paper adds novelty to the entrepreneurship education literature by bringing to the fore how a university in an emerging African economy is implementing and managing the EC pedagogy.

This paper explores knowledge sharing (KS) and intellectual capital (IC) impacts on the success rate of equity crowdfunding (EC) campaigns in the Italian market, which represents a new model for financing entrepreneurial initiatives.

The relation between KS, IC and the success rate of EC campaigns is analysed with a panel regression that measures IC through the value added intellectual coefficient. Social network analysis is used to measure KS in the users' network on Twitter for EC campaigning. Specifically, the authors consider the information users exchange on social networks as a proxy of KS and identify the hubs influencing information dissemination, the size and strength of networks for each EC campaign. Finally, the success rate of EC campaigns is a ratio of the number of positive campaigns to the total number of campaigns for each platform.

The success rate of EC campaigns is positively related to IC and significantly and positively related to the number of connections the EC platforms have.

The positive relationship between the hub role of social network platforms and the success of EC campaigns provides an important signal to crowdfunding operators. As more potential investors focus on an EC campaign, a bandwagon effect could involve uninformed investors. This result is crucial in order to better understand how social media activity affects crowdfunding success.

Although the literature has examined the impact of KS on general firm performance and the mediating role of intellectual capital, no prior studies have examined the impacts of KS and IC on the success rate of EC campaigns in a specific market.

The purpose of this paper is to add to the existing literature about whether and how a continuous belief-update mechanism affects investors' risk perceptions in crowdfunding. The authors build on existing literature on the impact of a continuous belief-update mechanism on return expectations and risk perceptions, as a result of the funders' personal return and risk experiences, and apply this approach to the crowdfunding area. The authors thus add two specific insights about these dynamic new markets. First, the authors measure the perceived risk along multiple dimensions. Second, the authors consider how perceived risk differs across experienced investors and inexperienced investors, using two levels of analysis.

The paper uses a unique data set of survey respondents on crowdfunding with financial returns. The data set covers Germany, Poland and Spain. Survey data were derived by market research conducted in two stages. The first stage consists of two questions asked within an omnibus survey conducted by computer-assisted telephone interviews. In the second stage, multiple questions (including QA.1 and QA.2 and demographics) were included in an online survey or computer-assisted web interview for the same three countries.

The authors find that experienced investors perceive risks at lower levels than users that are aware of crowdfunding, but have not yet had the experience of an actual investment. The authors also find that investors, who invest larger proportions of their savings in crowdfunding with financial returns, perceive risks even lower than “lighter” investors, for the majority of risks the authors investigate.

The study is limited in three European countries and explores crowdfunding with financial returns only.

The study suggests that investors' participation and activity in crowdfunding with financial returns can be increased, either via providing incentives for “first investment” or via the creation of investment simulators.

This study contributes to the following three areas. First, the authors shed new evidence on the dynamics of crowdfunding with financial returns and explore how decisions are being made in a context of reverse information asymmetries. Second, the authors explore how the “crowd” reshapes risk perceptions via a belief-update mechanism; this is of high importance under the absence of traditional financial intermediaries, which increases the severity of information asymmetries. Third, the authors enrich literature associated with how laypeople take investment decisions, showing how prior experience affects investment decision making.

The paper aims to explore the relationship between accounting and racial violence through an investigation of sharecropping in the postbellum American South.

A range of primary sources including peonage case files of the US Department of Justice and the archives of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are utilised. Data are analysed by reference to Randall Collins' theory of violence. Consistent with this theory, a micro-sociological approach to examining violent encounters is employed.

It is demonstrated that the production of alternative or competing accounts, accounting manipulation and failure to account generated interactions where confrontational tension culminated in bluster, physical attacks and lynching. Such violence took place in the context of potent racial ideologies and institutions.

The paper is distinctive in its focus on the interface between accounting and “actual” (as opposed to symbolic) violence. It reveals how accounting processes and traces featured in the highly charged emotional fields from which physical violence could erupt. The study advances knowledge of the role of accounting in race relations from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, a largely unexplored period in the accounting history literature. It also seeks to extend the research agenda on accounting and slavery (which has hitherto emphasised chattel slavery) to encompass the practice of debt peonage.

Jim Collins' Good to Great is but one of many popular press books on management. In his book, Collins discusses the keys to success for today's corporations. Many managers flocked to bookstores to discover what they might be missing in making their organization great. This paper aims to use methodologies more commonly found in the finance literature to validate the results of Collins' study.

This paper uses methodologies more commonly found in finance literature (e.g. event study methodology, Fama‐French three‐factor model with momentum, buy‐and‐hold abnormal returns) to validate the results of Collins' study.

The results show that the Good to Great firms had unexceptional performance when compared to other benchmark lists of firms, on an ex‐ante or ex‐post basis.

From a management perspective, the advice that one might obtain from Good to Great should be carefully examined by managers before they implement it, only to find that great is not really so great.

The paper is original in its methodological design and is valuable to managers who are seeking advice for opportunities that enhance shareholder wealth.