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Strong agreement in the extant business literature emphasizes that digital developments are key to economic growth internationally. This is in spite of the recorded high levels (up to 50 percent) of failure among digital companies and entrepreneurs. The purpose of this paper is to identify the digital debates in Italy, explore current policies and develop a typology that characterizes digital entrepreneurs (DEs) and their start-up companies in Italy.

The digital debates and policies are explored through an extensive telephone survey of the self-perceptions and identified supports required by 348 Italian active DEs. Quantitative statistical techniques were used including factor analysis, cluster analysis and ANOVA, to identify motivations, profiles and critical success factors relevant to the sample.

The study identifies three main clusters among the DEs: emerging very young; emerging business focused and experienced. These clusters vary with the entrepreneurs’ background and competence base, motivation and satisfaction factors. The different kinds of profiles require specific kinds of supporting policies identified by the sample that focus on financial, educational and/or networking provision.

The paper affirms the central role of digital entities in modern economies expressed in the current literature and increases knowledge of the perceived success factors identified by DEs. The identification and classification of self-reported characteristics of Italian DEs and to what extent these characterizations might be useful for tailored interventions to support their success are the main contributions of this study. Accordingly, an authentic, original and self-reported portrayal has been constructed of the self-perceptions of Italian DEs. Finally, the study explores the implications for actions and new policies considering self-perceived profiles, needs and expectations of DEs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of formal training in project‐based companies.

First the discussion deals with the concepts of learning, the learning environment, and the motivation to learn in a way in which special focus is on the project team members' motivation to learn. The hypothesis, “People working for project‐based companies are not interested in formal training” is tested by an empirical study, which was conducted on ten Finnish marine and offshore industry companies. Altogether, 54 project team members and project managers attended the multiple‐case study.

According to the results of the study, formal training is not seen as a necessity among the people working for project‐based companies. This seems to mean that nowadays formal training does not play a significant role in the development of project‐based companies. Further, the people do not necessarily have time to reflect because they are being bombarded by urgent problems and pressing deadlines. A lack of time and a feeling of heavy work load seem to be a normal practise.

Based upon the paper's findings, further research is suggested that would be focussed first on designing integrated learning environments in project‐based companies' processes, and/or second on the training methods utilized, interaction between trainers and project people, and relevancy and efficiency of formal training offered by training organizations to the project‐based companies.

Project team members frequently need to learn things already known in other projects, i.e. they need to acquire and assimilate organisational memory. The literature mentions numerous different types of repositories which form an organisational memory, and where organisational knowledge is maintained and into which newly‐acquired knowledge is deposited for later use by other people and teams. However, only seldom does the literature mention individuals' personal notes as a repository of knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to deal with the question of what is the role of individuals' personal notes in remembering in a project work context.

The conceptual part of the paper deals with the concepts of knowledge, organisational memory, knowledge sharing and motivation to share knowledge. The special focus in this connection is on the external memory aids and individuals' personal notes. Owing to the need to attain a better understanding of the role of individuals' personal notes in a project work context, results of an empirical study conducted in several Finnish project‐based companies are described in detail.

The results of the study suggest that the project team members' personal notes may play a very important role on the individual level and a rather important role on the team level of project work.

Personal notes making and utilisation of these notes as an external memory aid represents a challenge that many project‐based organisations are only now beginning to acknowledge.