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This study examines the social and human capital of successful Arab and Jewish technological entrepreneurs in Israel, and explores how human and social capital differ between technology-based industries.

A quantitative study was conducted using a sample of 1,184 technology-based ventures from two technology-based industries—life science (LS) and information technology (IT)—that were founded by Jewish and Arab entrepreneurs.

The results show that in the LS industry, successful Arab entrepreneurs possess higher human and social capital compared with Jewish entrepreneurs. However, in the IT industry, the Jewish entrepreneurs possess higher human and social capital. These findings reflect the deeper entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities regarding ethnic entrepreneurs' ability to break through technology-based industries. Future research directions are provided.

This study makes two contributions to the theoretical understanding of ethnic entrepreneurship and technology-based ventures. First, this study focuses on the impact of human and social capital on economic growth in the context of technological entrepreneurship in technology-based industries, since the ethnic entrepreneurship literature has mainly focused on traditional industries. Second, this study examines the effect of the founders' ethnicity, and explores how human and social capital factors vary across industries due to their specific contextual characteristics.

Israel, characterized by various knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms, provides an interesting case study for examining sector-based differences and “small country” regional patterns. This chapter has a dual goal of exploring sector and regional differences of knowledge-intensive firms in Israel. The first goal is to depict similarities and differences between firms in three knowledge-intensive sectors: Life Sciences, information technology, and Cleantech. The second goal questions whether the geographical distribution of these firms across regions is associated with different levels of knowledge concentration and organizational homogeneity. Regional and sector-based differences were measured by firm-level network structures, funding patterns, and innovation proxies. One way analysis of variance tests were conducted for attaining these research goals. The main findings show that while most regions exhibit similar patterns of firm and network characteristics, many differences exist on the sector level that are associated with sector-specific attributes. These findings support the notion of a “small country inter-regional homogeneity effect.”

The chapter presents a theoretical framework that deals with the basic question of how networks and industries coevolve. We draw upon the structural and relational perspectives of networks to theorize about changes occurring in interfirm networks over time and the coevolutionary linkage of these changes to the industry life cycle. We further extend the widely accepted industry life cycle model by claiming that industry-specific evolutionary patterns impact the structure of the network’s relations, which in turn lead to diversification in the sources of innovation and to variation in the patterns of industrial evolution.

The purpose of this paper is to present the organizational and technological processes and strategic choices that led to the successful digitization project of the Albert Einstein Archives.

This is a case study of the major challenges that were associated with the project. These include: the integration of the archives in the academic environment; the management of a project of such magnitude within the university organization and between different stakeholders and the technological aspects of the project and user experience.

A digitization project requires not only the archival staff expertise but also information specialists, IT staff, analysts and usually the digitization staff for processing the archival material. Finding the common language between all the professionals involved as well as building a good strategic plan are the keys to a successful project.

The planning and implementation of such a project requires a significant budget, manpower project management, hardware, software and intra- and inter-organizational cooperation and coordination.

The phenomenon of digitizing unique and exclusive archival data by universities is becoming an innovative contribution of hidden goods to the public at large. This paper offers strategic insights for the planning of similar digitizing projects, particularly in an academic environment.

In this paper, we examine the roles of innovation experts in organizations as part of a new and evolving field of knowledge. In our examination, we integrate two fields of study: the rise of new experts in organizations and the development of role identity. Our main goal is to map the epistemological processes these new experts go through coupled with their perceived identity, roles, and duties. Based on interviews with 33 innovation experts in profit and nonprofit organizations, we analyze the role expectations, the complexities associated with this role, and the unfolding identity processes. The analysis is based on three analytical lenses for understanding the identity processes of innovation experts in organizations: “becoming,” “doing,” and “relating.” Our findings are that identity work is needed to facilitate adaptation and reduce ambiguity in the work of innovation experts.