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This study aims to illustrate how a university can leverage a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) to act as a boundary spanner in international collaborations and multi-stakeholder value co-creation. This research explores the potential of a reimagined study abroad program to connect disparate entrepreneurial ecosystems and enhance the university’s role in fostering international collaborative projects.

This study uses a case study methodology to investigate an Erasmus+ BIP aimed at integrating real-world entrepreneurship with international learning. Data were collected through surveys, interviews and participant observation, providing a robust analysis of how such programs can bridge entrepreneurial ecosystems internationally.

The study shows how a blended study-abroad program not only enhances students’ learning outcomes but also can bridge local and international entrepreneurial ecosystems. By facilitating rich exchanges and value co-creation among students, faculty, industry and government stakeholders, the blended format of the program—integrating virtual and in-person elements—proved crucial in maintaining continuity and engagement amid global disruptions. The study highlights the university’s pivotal role both as a facilitator of global business education and international collaboration.

The study’s findings are based on a single BIP, so they may not apply to all similar programs worldwide. To understand the broader applicability and impact across different contexts, future research should include diverse BIPs from various regions and sectors.

This research highlights the multifaceted benefits of blended intensive study-abroad programs. The collaborative model serves as a template for enhancing the practical value of higher education globally.

The study provides insights into the potential of blended intensive programs for universities to extend their role as boundary-spanners through a unique model for international collaboration and multi-stakeholder engagement. This approach addresses the challenges of global disruptions and sets a precedent for future educational practices in international business.

The case is primarily based on publicly available data, which includes the company website, industry reports and articles published in various media sources, as well as video-recorded interviews with the company representatives. Some factual data is fetched from or triangulated with public and licensed databases such as Statista, Crunchbase and PitchBook.

In November 2021, six years after its establishment, a Finnish food delivery platform startup, Wolt Enterprise Oy, was acquired by San Francisco-based technology company Doordash, Inc., in a staggering all-stock transaction of approximately US$8.1bn (EUR 7bn). This case invites students to analyze the international growth of a startup from its establishment toward becoming a unicorn amidst an ongoing pandemic and further toward a top-level exit deal and continuation as a subsidiary of a publicly listed multinational company. The case provides an overview of the food delivery industry and its key players and examines the challenges and opportunities faced by Wolt as it expanded to different regions, including Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The case provides a comprehensive and nuanced perspective on the strategic decisions and trade-offs that entrepreneurs face in the rapidly evolving food delivery market. By the end of this case study, students will learn about internationalization challenges and opportunities in the food delivery industry, how to navigate external shocks like COVID-19, analyze the competitiveness of a born-global startup in a competitive delivery business and evaluate the pros and cons of an acquisition deal for future international growth.

The case is designed for use in graduate courses in international business and entrepreneurship, such as internationalization of the firm and global marketing, strategies of business growth and international business strategy. A more diverse student body will be beneficial in uncovering different views on country differences, including various competitive, technological and regulative landscapes.

It provides insights into the challenges digital platforms like Wolt face when expanding globally. Students can apply theories such as the Uppsala model and platform economics while exploring how network effects and first-mover advantages influence Wolt’s competitive edge. The case also highlights localization strategies for global marketing and serves as a basis for examining valuation and integration in mergers and acquisitions. Overall, it helps students understand the unique dynamics and growth strategies in digital platform businesses worldwide. This case was classroom tested in the Internationalization of Firm and Global Marketing course for first-year master’s students of the International Business and Entrepreneurship program of LUT University Business School, Finland, during the years 2020–2023. Prior to this course, the students completed the Global Business Environment course, where they learned how to analyze forces in the external environment for further development of firm-level internationalization strategies.

This chapter investigates the role of authentic leadership in international entrepreneurship. The authors examine how the four pillars of authentic leadership – self-awareness, relational transparency, internalised moral perspective and balanced processing of information – can promote effective collaboration for cross-border social value creation in entrepreneurial ventures. Questions that the authors address are: How do we define ‘international’ entrepreneurship from the perspective of authentic leadership? Are new or different leadership qualities required for the ‘international’ dimension? What are international leadership values or/and qualities and how does the international context change what competencies are needed? The authors call for research to examine how leadership can be depersonalised and become collective rather than an individual trait.

This chapter proposes authentic leadership as a generic competence and an integral part of doctoral education regardless of field of study. The authors explore its potential to enhance the development of doctoral candidates and academics and search for answers to the questions: Can and should authentic leadership be developed as a generic competence in doctoral education? How can it be designed and implemented in a doctoral training module? What would its learning outcomes be? The authors address these questions in the context of doctoral education. They assert that authentic leadership training should be mandatory for all doctoral candidates, and that supervisors should be actively engaged in the development of this underappreciated transferrable skill.

This study aims to analyze the processes of introducing apps (Easy Taxi and Uber) in the work routine of taxi and private drivers, exploring their work relations and identifying new forms of relationship between them and their passengers. The authors expose the complexity in which such processes occur in a dialogical way, aligning poststructuralist notions of actor–network theory with theorizations on subjectivity production.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 drivers of Easy Taxi and Uber apps in three Brazilian capitals.

Apps came to play a central role in the work practice of the drivers interviewed. The authors suggest that they offer more security, convenience, accessibility and agility, going beyond dependent forms of working and living, in overlapping networks and connections, enacting entities that guide workers and users to an increasingly programmed way of life.

New forms of thinking managerial relations with taxi and private drivers work and their work relations with other drivers and passengers.

This kind of technology not only generates new social relations but also activates mechanisms of subjectivation that reverberate new forms of relating, working and living in contemporaneity.

Approaches on subjectivity regarding the adoption of technology in the practice of work in the contemporaneity, with the emergence of new working relations mediated by e-hailing technology.

The purpose of this paper is to define and solve the problem of an optimized structural topology of the simply supported beam made from functionally graded material (FGM) enabling achievement of a maximum buckling load.

Two kinds of inclusions are considered: regular distribution of inclusions of different rigidities and non-uniform distribution of identical inclusions. It is shown that the optimal conditions are similar for both structural designs. The optimization problems are solved by using the homogenization method, and the target functions belong to the class of piece-wise continuous functions. Both optimized structures exhibit border zones free of any inclusions, and the largest amount of inclusions is localized in the central zone of the beams.

It has been shown that the final result of the carried out optimization of the internal structure for both studied types of FGM are similar. The relative increase in the buckling force of the FG beam with the optimized internal structure is on amount of 20 per cent while comparing it with the regular structure beam.

In contrary to a standard approach, this paper is aimed to detect and study a scenario of transition from heterogeneous to its counterpart homogeneous beam structure based on the consideration of the FGM inclusions. In addition, the problem of inversed transition from the optimized homogeneous structure to the optimal heterogeneous one is solved.