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All over the world, countries are searching for ways to foster innovation and growth through startups. This viewpoint paper presents the aims, development procedure and contents of Germany's “Startup Strategy,” published for the first time in 2022, along with a fundamental assessment of its potential usefulness.

In this opinionated viewpoint paper, the authors provide an overview of the strategy's contents and discuss it against established policy frameworks focusing on the determinants of innovative entrepreneurial activity and the potential consequences of the strategy on the micro-, meso- and macro levels of the German economy. Additionally, the authors evaluate and analyze the strategy's proposed fields of action to illustrate its potential impact on innovative entrepreneurial activity.

The strategy's development avoids considering an evidence-based, fundamental framework to structure its fields of action and instead relies on diverse input from various entrepreneurial agents. As a result, it emphasizes access to finance for startups and building entrepreneurial capabilities as its main fields of action. On the one hand, the authors show how the contents of the German “Startup Strategy” can be matched with the OECD (2017) framework. On the other hand, the authors offer detailed insights into how the “Startup Strategy's” fields of action might influence the German economy's micro, meso and macro levels.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this article is the first one commenting on the German government's first-ever published startup strategy. Hence, this might offer several starting points for other researchers to analyze future startup strategies. Also, comparing such strategic approaches in other European countries and beyond might be a starting point for developing public policies in this field. Also, researchers on entrepreneurial ecosystems and innovation ecosystems will find concrete anchor points for these subject areas.

Policymakers can use this viewpoint paper to devise future actions. The paper provides concrete fields of action on the individual and company levels, as well as on a national economic and regional ecosystem level, to derive such recommendations.

Germany is one of the strongest economic nations in the world and by far in Europe. Hence, this startup strategy comes with the potential for substantial impact. This viewpoint paper may inspire the development of other national strategies to create a positive economic and societal environment supporting the emergence of more innovative startups. In particular, the strategy's focus on diversity and social entrepreneurship seems promising.

This study aims to investigate how Germans' misperceptions of the nature of entrepreneurship influence their attitudes towards entrepreneurial failure.

Adopting a multivariate regression analysis, the study used data collected from a commercial online market research panel (N = 2,027) reflecting the overall German working population. Attitudinal items on business failure were used to measure the study variables. The study controlled for age, education, employment status, gender, income, whether the respondent knows a failed entrepreneur and the German federal state in which the respondent resides.

The findings suggest that reservations about failed entrepreneurs become stronger as misperceptions of the nature of entrepreneurship worsen. The results also show that failure reservations vary regionally over the 16 German federal states.

Nationwide efforts regarding the stimulation of entrepreneurship and the acceptance of entrepreneurial failure are insufficient for removing failure reservations, as they neglect regional cultural differences. The results suggest that it is not enough just to invest in efforts to create a failure-friendly culture, and that a better general education about the realities of entrepreneurship is a prerequisite.

The study generates insights into how the overall population in an innovation-driven economy perceives entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial failure. Moreover, the work delves into the reasons why parts of German society reject failed entrepreneurs. Hence, this study can aid the drafting of effective policy initiatives at the regional and national levels.

Non-entrepreneurial passions may be the beginning of an extensive entrepreneurial journey. However, current passion theories cannot fully capture the essence of such passions and their effects. The purpose of this study is to explore and explain the real-life composition of passion and performance.

The investigation was conducted with comparative causal mapping (CCM) on a qualitative sample of people we designate rock “n” roll entrepreneurs (i.e. individuals driven by a passion for music and who are successful both artistically and economically). Aggregated causal maps of passion elicited through semi-structured interviews were analyzed and contrasted with performance indicators.

Passion is revealed to be an individual phenomenon, one composed of central and peripheral concepts that include—contrary to prior theories—personality traits and life contexts. Furthermore, the results suggest that the concordance of concepts determines the scope, degree and performance of passion.

This study complements prevailing passion theories in psychology and entrepreneurship. As a context-bound study, the generalizability of the results is limited to its context, which, however, paves a clear way for future research.

Creative economy entrepreneurs and educators can use the mechanism of concordance to consciously reflect passion-driven tensions between artistic, social and entrepreneurial demands and to translate passion into behavioral effectiveness.

This study is the first to use a CCM approach to investigate passion. Findings highlight the potential to research entrepreneurial phenomena at the intersection of emotion, cognition and action.

The success of corporate innovation is based less upon the success of a single innovation program than on a holistic and overarching corporate innovation system integrating various activities. Taking this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to extend existing research on the design of innovation programs.

Utilizing an inductive theory-building case study approach, this study provides a detailed analysis of how one of the largest and most successful German technology companies structures its many innovation activities.

The analysis identifies key elements of innovation programs and suggests three configurations that illustrate how these generic elements can be structured so as to offer the best fit with the underlying logic of the respective innovation program. Furthermore, this study highlights how the identified configurations come together to deliver overarching strategic innovation goals.

Existing research too often focuses solely on single innovation programs. The current research is among the first to take a holistic and overarching perspective, considering different innovation programs within a single company and analyzing their configuration and their interplay.

This study scrutinizes the evolution of thematic directions in the domain of growth-oriented women entrepreneurship research over the past two decades. Furthermore, it explores the implications of this evolution for future research and practical endeavors.

The authors conduct a bibliometric analysis of 741 publications from 2004 to 2023. The analysis first examines publication numbers and identifies important journals and articles based on performance analysis. Moreover, using science mapping techniques, the study provides four thematic maps organized into five-year periods, as well as a Sankey diagram.

The analysis reveals a significant surge in research activity, particularly since 2014, in terms of both the quantity and diversity of themes. The findings show that in 2004–2008, six themes were driving the research domain, but in 2019–2023, the number of themes increased to 24. Moreover, this study offers a holistic perspective on prospective research directions, emphasizing two key themes: emerging economies and sustainability.

This study makes an important contribution by bringing together scholarship on women entrepreneurs and growth-oriented ventures. These themes can be a significant factor in stimulating new approaches to economic growth when considered together. Moreover, this study emphasizes the need for a more diverse and inclusive research environment.

Entrepreneurial communication describes the communication activities of entrepreneurs and is an essential tool for entrepreneurs to build relationships. However, there is a lack of research regarding how entrepreneurs adapt their communication styles in times of crisis. Nevertheless, entrepreneurial communication during a crisis is essential because entrepreneurs must continue communicating with their stakeholders and be visible. In this regard, communication has the central aim of preventing the startup from suffering any damage that may result from the crisis. Thus, the present paper explores potential shifts in the communication styles of entrepreneurs during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors examined the digital footprints of 780 entrepreneurs based in the USA on the social network Twitter. This study used a longitudinal dataset with the software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to analyze 110,283 tweets sent pre-crisis and during the first wave of COVID-19.

The results of the exploratory analysis revealed a connection between crisis and both analytical thinking and emotional responses. In the case of emotions, the results also suggest that entrepreneurs who had already received funding from venture capital investors remained emotionally robust during the crisis, as evidenced by the expression of more positive emotions compared to entrepreneurs without funding.

This study contributes to the understanding of entrepreneurial communication and adds the context of an exogenous shock to this research stream. Furthermore, this study highlights the effects of venture funding on the digital communication style of entrepreneurs, especially in the context of expressed emotions, and suggests emotional robustness for these entrepreneurs.

Opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation are two central concepts in the entrepreneurial process. However, there is a lack of both a clear specification of the content domains of the constructs and valid and reliable multi-item scales for their measurement. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper first reveals existing issues around the definitions and measures relating to the concepts, then defines their content domains, and also proposes scale items to measure the concepts. Four samples are used to develop the measurement instruments.

Two scales are suggested, one to measure opportunity recognition, and other to measure opportunity exploitation. The scales demonstrate reliability and construct, discriminant, and nomological validity.

The resulting instruments provide tools for research and practice that could prove valuable when examining the antecedents and consequences of both opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been viewed almost exclusively through the lens of profit-driven firms. However, individuals engage in entrepreneurship not only for economic reasons but also to enrich a community or to advance society. Drawing on upper echelons theory, the purpose of this paper is to address this issue by proposing that founders’ social identities shape the strategic choices of their ventures.

Drawing on the data from 318 founders in the early stages of their entrepreneurial activity, the study applies partial least squares structural equation modeling to empirically test whether founders’ social identities influence their ventures’ EO.

The findings of the current research show that founders whose dominant purpose is the creation of value for others are more likely to launch ventures oriented toward innovation. On the other hand, ventures of founders driven by economic self-interest accept more risk, which leads to higher performance outcomes on the enterprise, community and societal levels.

The study enhances the EO discussion by adding social identity theory as a way to explain different levels of EO in firms and answers the call for more diversity in EO–performance measurement by applying specific outcomes on the enterprise, community and societal levels to investigate whether a firm’s EO leads to the desired outcomes.

This article offers a bibliometric analysis and explores the relationships among the documents on ecopreneurship by using relational techniques. The results highlight the publication trends; most cited documents, top contributing authors, countries and institutions with highest productivity and most contributing journals to the research field.

Initially, 216 documents were retrieved from the Thompson Reuters Web of Science Core Collection database with three document types: articles, review and book review. All the documents were considered for the analysis. Then VOSviewer and bibliometric analysis using R with an inbuilt utility Biblioshiny were used together for co-word analysis, co-citation network analysis, generating collaboration networks and also generating a unique three-field plot to analyze the evolution of a research field.

The results highlight the publication trends: most cited documents, top contributing authors, countries and institutions with highest productivity and most contributing journals to the research field. The network analysis of co-authorship, co-citation, keyword co-occurrence and bibliographic coupling reveals most prominent relationships between authors, documents, co-cited references, sources and countries for the available documents on the research field.

The study helps not only in expansion of knowledgebase on the research topic but also in understanding the evolution of the ecopreneurship to provide research support further in this area.

Ecopreneurship is an emerging field of research connecting ecology and entrepreneurship together, making it a potential research area. The contributions made to this research field from 1989 to 2019 serve as a core for conducting this analysis. The study is an effort to help in coordinating research network across countries, authors and affiliating universities.