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Through a cross-culture study, the purpose of this paper is to understand about how entrepreneurial universities can foster entrepreneurship in women by attending to psychological and environmental factors and personality traits that encourage women to form entrepreneurial intent.

The authors test the proposed conceptual model on a cross-cultural sample comprising 350 students from Italy, a developed country, and from Albania, an emerging country. Structural equation modeling is used to validate the proposed model and test the hypothesized relationships.

In both Italy and Albania, entrepreneurial universities significantly impact entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions in women. The major differences relate to psychological factors that predict self-employment attitudes and intentions. Specifically, risk-taking propensity and locus of control are important antecedents of attitudes in both samples; the need for independence is a significant predictor only in the Italian sample; need for achievement has significant influence only in the Albanian sample.

To better understand and interpret the phenomenon of female entrepreneurship, the authors use the theory of planned behavior to investigate entrepreneurial universities located in Italy, a developed country, and Albania, an emerging country.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of firms’ features on innovation performance in Industry 4.0, focusing on the concepts of breadth and depth of openness in the innovation process.

Using data gathered from 96 firms active in Industry 4.0 (I4.0) in Italy, a Poisson regression analysis is conducted to investigate the relationship between the openness of firms’ innovation processes at the level of knowledge sources and their innovation performance in I4.0.

The results highlight the relationship between the level of openness and innovative performance in I4.0. In particular, the breadth of the openness of the innovation process of enterprises is curvilinearly related to innovation in I4.0, taking an inverted U-shape.

Managers of firms operating in I4.0 should consider openness as a strategic response to the knowledge requirements and risks associated with the innovation process in complex technologies.

Through the questionnaires administered mainly to highly qualified individuals, an original and unique database has been created with information on the openness of the innovative process and the innovation performances in I4.0.

The purpose of this paper is to capture the role of internal and external characteristics in favouring the growth of innovative start-ups at an early stage of their life.

The empirical approach of this paper is based on an econometric analysis applied to all Italian innovative start-ups with four and five years of life. Growth is analysed after four and five years from the constitution, depending on internal investments in research and development (R&D), in tangible assets and on characteristics external to the firm (110 Italian provinces) related to industrial variety, specialisation, public investments in R&D, etc.

The results achieved in this study reveal the importance of internal R&D investment even though there is missing evidence on the relevance of general and government specific R&D investment in the area. Other interesting results concern the importance of the firm’s involvement in the technological specialisation of the area and the need for general variety in technological diversification in the area to favour the growth of start-ups.

The results imply that entrepreneurs should evaluate carefully their strategic choices in terms of the location of the start-up and the investment in R&D as these could be important factors for the firm’s growth.

This paper is an original attempt to measure the importance of both internal and external characteristics for the growth of start-ups. Moreover, the analysis covers the overall population of a new interesting category of firm, the innovative start-up.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate behavioural and contextual factors affecting entrepreneurial universities’ ability to influence student entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intention.

Structural equation modelling was used to assess both micro and macro factors impacting on students’ entrepreneurial attitude and intention on a sample of 272 students of the Master of Business Administration at the University of Florence (Italy).

The study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial universities by assessing the main factors affecting students’ entrepreneurial behaviour. The results stressed how students’ entrepreneurial intent is mainly affected by their entrepreneurial attitude, which is in turn influenced by some of the personality traits analyzed, in particular risk-taking propensity and locus of control. It also emerged how students’ perception of the university environment significantly influences their entrepreneurial attitude and intent.

By investigating the micro and macro factors that mostly affect students’ entrepreneurial intention, the research suggests some implications for future researches into student entrepreneurship, in order to develop specific teaching programmes affecting students’ entrepreneurial experience, character and related skills.

The value of the research relates to integrating psychological factors, geographical elements, and the contextual role of universities within student entrepreneurship in a scarcely investigated location, i.e. the Region of Tuscany (Italy).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the different drivers of the establishment of innovation relationships in an aerospace cluster. In particular, the work investigates the impact of the various forms of proximity in the formation of inter-organisational collaborations for innovation.

The analysis is based on primary data collected through interviews and questionnaires on innovation collaborations, administered to all the firms operating in the aerospace cluster in Tuscany. The work applies social network analysis and Exponential Random Graph Models to analyse the forces that drive inter-organisational collaborations for innovation.

Results confirm the importance of geographical proximity in the formation of ties in the cluster, but social proximity is one of the main drivers for tie formation. Reciprocity shows that companies develop innovations in a reciprocal way and that most relationships are bidirectional. Triadic closure is also relevant, where the role played by trust and previous relationships is evident. Finally, hierarchy network processes are underlined, where the most central actors of the network are the most popular confirming a processes of preferential attachment. The central organisations gradually are more important, whereas the marginal ones are left in the periphery.

The work presents some novelties. First, it measures the different impacts of the various forms of proximity together with more advanced measures of network analysis. It allows pointing out the relevance of a firm’s network position in clusters and the fact that clusters assume hierarchical structures similar to centre-periphery networks, where most relevant nodes are in the inner core and marginal organisations are relegated.

None of the numerous food products that comprise the Italian food tradition can boast of business revitalisation as much as that which involved the wine industry in Italy and in the rest of the world in the last decade. This is not the appropriate moment to consider the reasons for this change, nor is it the right place to compare the industrial situations of that time with those present today. Rapidly covering the field of the extensive history of the wine business, it is sufficient to cite certain simplified facts in order to show how the end user of the product – the consumer – has dramatically changed his consumption history, which initiated the process of regeneration of the business, a process never before seen, in the world of agricultural industries. The companies in the vine‐growing and wine‐making business have been both the driving force and the beneficiaries of this state of affairs. Indeed, to have a clearer picture, a hypothetical external person, observing the wine business panorama today, would notice clear features and company models, that are unrelated to the historical past of the industry.