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The purpose of this article is to highlight the key points for succeeding with the freemium business model in online digital business from a strategic point of view. The freemium business model has recently become one of the most dominant business models in online markets. However, entrepreneurs and managers still have a limited understanding of why some freemium business models become successful and sustainable while others do not.

The findings and recommendations derive from the study of online digital companies and applications, which either succeeded or failed to develop a sustainable freemium model. These are LinkedIn, Spotify, Box, Eventbrite, Chargify, Gasketball and TravelCrony.

The article describes the generic strategy and the key strategic choices that enable and support successful freemium business model execution in an online digital business.

The research is limited to digital companies applying a freemium business model and offering their products and services online.

The findings and recommendations can help new and existing companies, first, to evaluate if the freemium business model is feasible for them, and second, to adjust strategies to develop a successful freemium business model and scale it up.

The article extends the current understanding of the freemium business model logic.

Since Sarasvathy’s (2001) research on decision-making logics of expert entrepreneurs, effectuation has become a cornerstone in entrepreneurship education. Effectuation is not only subjectified in entrepreneurship education, but has also become conceptualized as a method in the learning process. The purpose of this paper is to explore how students, who are novice entrepreneurs, react to working effectually and which barriers they face when applying effectual decision-making logics in a university course.

A student-centered process course in entrepreneurship with 142 students provides a unique opportunity to explore the phenomena. Participant/teacher observations, written and oral work from the students and finally formal and informal written evaluations of the course by the students provide comprehensive data.

The authors find that students experience three barriers to using effectuation. These are: noviceness, regarding the project as a “school project,” perceived lack of legitimacy of both the instructors and the process.

The contribution of this study is threefold: first, to contribute to the understanding of the applicability of effectuation for novice entrepreneurs in the classroom; second, to articulate the factors that hinder entrepreneurial learning when effectuation is used in a process course; and third, to shed light on the importance of contextual factors for individual learning.

This paper investigates the importance of team formation in entrepreneurship education, and the authors ask: how do different team formation strategies influence teamwork in higher education experiential learning-based entrepreneurship courses?

Employing a multiple case study design, the authors examine 38 student teams from three different entrepreneurship courses with different team formation paths to uncover potential links between team formation and learning outcomes.

The authors find that team formation mode matters. Randomly assigned teams, while diverse, struggle with handling uncertainty and feedback from potential stakeholders. In contrast, student self-selected teams are less diverse but more robust in handling this pressure. Results suggest that in randomly assigned teams, the entrepreneurial project becomes the team's sole reference point for well-being. Seeking to protect the project, the team's ability to deal with uncertainty and external feedback is limited, stifling development. In student self-select teams, team well-being becomes a discrete reference point. This enables these teams to respond effectively to external project feedback while nurturing team well-being independently.

Education theories' implications about the benefit of team diversity may not apply to experiential learning-based entrepreneurship education's typical level of ambiguity and uncertainty. Therefore, educators may have to reconsider the unique dynamics of team formation strategies to ensure strong teamwork and teamwork outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nascent market settings from a business model innovation perspective with the research questions: How do incumbents and start-ups make sense of an emerging technology through business model design in a nascent market setting, and how does business model choice influence firm performance?

The authors have tracked the development of four case companies in the nascent electric vehicle market from 2009 to 2018 and have conducted interviews and analyzed the archival data.

The authors propose a typology of business model choices and performance where the four types of business models distinguish themselves by how the companies innovate or imitate the value proposition of the current industry as well as how they innovate or imitate the business model archetype. In accordance with these different business model choices, the actors express different logics behind their new to the product market space business model choice. These logics represent different understandings of technology potential, customer needs as well as potential for value capture and contribute to and limit the translation of emerging technologies into dominant designs in diverse ways.

The business model is conceived as a focusing device that can be used to identify market applications for emerging technologies. As new disruptive technologies often require a new to the product market space business model, literature has in recent years put a premium on business model innovation. However, the linkages between emergent technologies and the choice of a novel business model are under investigated especially in relation to how business model choice affects business performance in nascent market settings. This paper aims at filling this gap.

In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurs can deploy their values to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders. Such an understanding forms a critical endeavor to tackle grand challenges adequately. Building on sensegiving research, we conducted a single-case study of an entrepreneurial initiative that tackles gender inequality in Lebanon which has been successful in mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders who ordinarily would not collaborate with each other. We find that the values of the founders were pivotal for the initiative’s success as those values activated latent values of stakeholders through processes of contextualization and enactment. We subsume these processes under the label value-driven sensegiving. As a result of value-driven sensegiving, heterogeneous stakeholders could make sense of the founders’ aspirational vision and the role they could play in it, which paved ways for tackling grand challenges collaboratively. Our study provides insights into the centrality of values for mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders across boundaries. Therefore, it contributes to the body of work on sensegiving, societal grand challenges, and new forms of organizing.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The article describes the generic strategy and the key strategic choices that enable and support successful freemium business model execution in an online digital business.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Societal grand challenges have moved from a marginal concern to a mainstream issue within organization and management theory. How diverse forms of organizing help tackle – or reinforce – grand challenges has become centrally important. In this introductory paper, we take stock of the contributions to the volume on Organizing for Societal Grand Challenges and identify three characteristics of grand challenges that require further scholarly attention: their interconnectedness, fluidity, and paradoxical nature. We also emphasize the need to expand our methodological repertoire and reflect upon our practices as a scholarly community.