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The aim of the study is to examine the effects of opportunity creation and discovery on the performance of family firms. Specifically, from the tenets of dynamic capabilities and organizational contingency perspectives, this study proposes and tests a framework of how family firms' creation and discovery behavior impact venture growth and the conditions under which such impact can vary.

The study uses moderated-hierarchical regression to analyze survey data from 156 family-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating within a sub-Saharan African economy.

The findings indicate that creation behavior has a curvilinear U-shaped relationship with venture growth, while discovery behavior has a direct positive relationship with venture growth. Further analysis reveals that the curvilinearity of the U-shaped relationship between creation and venture growth will be stronger for older family firms than for younger ones.

The study findings may be limited by the cross-sectional nature of the data and the specific focus on family firms only.

The results highlight the significance of pursuing both opportunities among family firms. In fact, both creation and discovery opportunities are significant drivers of family firm growth, albeit in different capacities. Relatedly, managers of older family firms (compared to younger firms) can invest more in exploiting creative opportunities.

From these findings, governments and other stakeholders should create enabling environment and institutional frameworks conducive to exploiting opportunities by entrepreneurial firms.

The study is novel – as it provides unique findings on the performance implications of creation and discovery behavior of entrepreneurial family firms within developing economies.

Nowadays, creation and discovery theories are the two main theoretical approaches supporting the studies on the emergence of enterprises and some scholars analyze these theories in isolation. In addition, studies that investigate the emergence of social enterprises based on these theories together are scarce. This paper aims to analyze if and how discovery and creation theories can coexist in the formation process of social enterprises.

A multi-case study based on semi-structured interviews with the founders of eight Brazilian social enterprises was conducted.

From the results, it is identified that there is a continuous process between discoveries and creations that lead to the maturation of the initial idea and, consequently, to the formation of a social enterprise. Therefore, a continuous process model between discovery and creation of opportunities in the formation of a social enterprise (i.e. a mixed theoretical approach) is proposed, going beyond a theoretical duality between creation or discovery.

This study helps to overcome limitations inherent in both discovery and creation theories, proposing a mixed theoretical approach. This new theoretical approach praises the existence of new paths to understand the emergence of social enterprises, by overcoming the theoretical duality between creation or discovery of opportunities, i.e. a new understanding of an integrating process rather than a dichotomous one.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of serendipity and approaches to its study particularly in relation to information studies.

The origins of the term serendipity are described and its elaboration as an exploratory and explanatory concept in science and the social sciences are outlined. The distinction between serendipity and serendipity pattern is explained and theoretical and empirical studies of both serendipity and the serendipity patterns are explored. The relationship between information encountering is described. Empirical studies of serendipity using Citation Classics and other research approaches in information studies are described.

The discrepancy between occurrences of serendipity in studies using Citation Classics and reported serendipity in philosophy of science, research anecdotes, information encountering and information seeking by inter-disciplinary researchers is highlighted. A comparison between a process model of serendipity and serendipity as an emergent behavioural characteristic are indicates directions for future research.

The paper provides and original synthesis of the theoretical and empirical literature on serendipity with particular reference to work in information studies and an indication of the methodological difficulties involved in its study.

There is progress in entrepreneurship research. Important works in entrepreneurship increasingly appear in highly respected, mainstream journals (see Busenitz et al., 2003; Davidsson, Low & Wright, 2001). There is conceptual development that attracts attention (e.g. Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) and handbooks are compiled, providing the field with more of a common body of knowledge (Acs & Audretsch, 2003a; Shane, 2000a; Westhead & Wright, 2000). Further, there is evidence of methodological improvements (Chandler & Lyon, 2001) and accumulation of meaningful findings on various levels of analysis (Davidsson & Wiklund, 2001). Moreover, due to time lags in publication the reported improvements are likely to be underestimated. This author’s experience as organizer, reviewer and participant in core entrepreneurship conferences on both sides of the Atlantic (e.g. Babson; RENT) suggests that much of the lower end of the quality distribution has either disappeared from the submissions or is screened out in the review process. Much more than used to be the case a few years back we find among the presented papers research that is truly theory-driven; research on the earliest stages of business development, and research that employs methods suitable for causal inference, i.e. experiments and longitudinal designs.

The successful provision of context‐awareness in pervasive environments requires the support of autonomic management facilities that provide ways to efficiently acquire and use contextual information. This paper claims that in order to offer viable context‐aware services, the issue of context imperfection and aging as well as the alignment of the context information that is used by a service with the customized service objectives should be taken into account. It presents an approach for managing the selection of context sources considering the freshness and actuality of the available information, and dynamically adapting to any source change and failure. Accordingly, there is no need to know beforehand the context sources to obtain the required information, but a quality‐aware discovery of the sources is envisioned. Finally, the proposed approach allows services to be ported easily to an environment with a different set of context sources.

As an emerging tool for data discovery, data retrieval systems fail to effectively support users' cognitive processes during data search and access. To uncover the relationship between data search and access and the cognitive mechanisms underlying this relationship, this paper examines the associations between affective memories, perceived value, search effort and the intention to access data during users' interactions with data retrieval systems.

This study conducted a user experiment for which 48 doctoral students from different disciplines were recruited. The authors collected search logs, screen recordings, questionnaires and eye movement data during the interactive data search. Multiple linear regression was used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that positive affective memories positively affect perceived value, while the effects of negative affective memories on perceived value are nonsignificant. Utility value positively affects search effort, while attainment value negatively affects search effort. Moreover, search effort partially positively affects the intention to access data, and it serves a full mediating role in the effects of utility value and attainment value on the intention to access data.

Through the comparison between the findings of this study and relevant findings in information search studies, this paper reveals the specificity of behaviour and cognitive processes during data search and access and the special characteristics of data discovery tasks. It sheds light on the inhibiting effect of attainment value and the motivating effect of utility value on data search and the intention to access data. Moreover, this paper provides new insights into the role of memory bias in the relationships between affective memories and data searchers' perceived value.

Semantic retrieval and discovery of datasets published as open data remains a challenging task. The datasets inherently originate in the globally distributed web jungle, lacking the luxury of centralized database administration, database schemes, shared attributes, vocabulary, structure and semantics. The existing dataset catalogs provide basic search functionality relying on keyword search in brief, incomplete or misleading textual metadata attached to the datasets. The search results are thus often insufficient. However, there exist many ways of improving the dataset discovery by employing content-based retrieval, machine learning tools, third-party (external) knowledge bases, countless feature extraction methods and description models and so forth.

In this paper, the authors propose a modular framework for rapid experimentation with methods for similarity-based dataset discovery. The framework consists of an extensible catalog of components prepared to form custom pipelines for dataset representation and discovery.

The study proposes several proof-of-concept pipelines including experimental evaluation, which showcase the usage of the framework.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, there is no similar formal framework for experimentation with various similarity methods in the context of dataset discovery. The framework has the ambition to establish a platform for reproducible and comparable research in the area of dataset discovery. The prototype implementation of the framework is available on GitHub.

The purpose of this paper is to understand and inform the development and implementation of a newly established Discovery College (a youth-focused Recovery College). It also aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the benefits and barriers to establishing Recovery Colleges.

The overall study took a mixed-methods approach to the evaluation of Discovery College, including a qualitative process evaluation component as well as a mixed-methods outcomes evaluation. This paper reports on the findings of the process evaluation, which undertook key informant interviews with a range of stakeholders in the implementation process.

A total of 16 themes emerged from the qualitative data, which were then clustered into four main areas: establishing Discovery College, organisational context, nature of Discovery College and service transformation. Implementation was reported as both feasible and effective. Initial tension between fidelity to the model and a pragmatic approach to action was negotiated during implementation and through an ability of staff to tolerate uncertainty, enabled by the efforts and support of senior service management and college staff.

Recovery Colleges co-designed and implemented in youth mental health services are a recent development in the field of mental health care and very little has previously been published regarding the feasibility, effectiveness and acceptability of youth-focused Recovery Colleges. This paper is one of the first to assess the barriers and enablers to the implementation of Discovery College within a clinical youth mental health service.

In this chapter, we present a collaborative autoethnographic study with two main layers: first, we share experiences of two separate educational research projects and explore how different dialogic research practices facilitate both participants and researchers to discover the phenomenon being studied; second, we engage in a dialogic conversation to discover our own research practices. Focussing on projects in two different countries (Norway and Canada), our initial centring question for this chapter is: how do our research practices facilitate insight into participants’ real-life experiences and practices? Then turning the light on our own research practices, we ask: what onto-epistemological assumptions shape our dialogical research practices? The chapter reveals that dialogic research practices allowed collective wisdom to be discovered and ensured that we were able to break through the taken-for-grantedness both of the concept being studied and of our own research practices.

The growth of knowledge literature acknowledges the importance of the institutional context of science for the discovery of knowledge. This chapter argues that in addition to the institutions that connect experts, the institutional context that exists between experts and their subjects importantly influences the relevance of the knowledge that experts discover. When experts are removed from their subject and feedback mechanisms are weak, the type of knowledge discovered by networks of experts has little policy relevance. When experts operate in a network that is closely linked to their subjects, the type of knowledge they discover will have a greater degree of policy relevance. Evidence from P. T. Bauer's work on different networks of experts in the developing world is used to illustrate this theory.