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Big data management research and practice, however, have received enormous interest from academia and industry; the extant literature demonstrates that the authors have limited understanding and challenges in this knowledge-stream to fully capitalize with its potentials. One of the contemporary challenges is to accurately verify data veracity, and developing value from the verified data for an organization and its stakeholders. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to develop insights on how the authors could strategically deal with the contemporary challenges in strategic management of big data, related to data veracity and data value.

The inductive–constructivist approach is followed to develop insights at the intersection of dynamic capabilities theory and stakeholder relationship management concept, in order to strategically deal with the contemporary challenges in big data management, related to data veracity and data value.

At the intersection of dynamic capabilities theory and stakeholder relationship management concept, an implication is acknowledged, which has research and practical significance to strategically verify data source, its veracity and value. Following this implication, a framework of a data incubator is proposed to proactively develop insights on veracity and value of data. Empirical insights are also presented in this study to support this initial framework.

For future research in strategic management of big data, academics will have contextual understanding on the particular interconnected and interdependent attributes from dynamic capabilities and stakeholder relationship management research streams to further enhance the understanding on big data management. For practice, these insights will be useful for executives to focus on specific attributes of the proposed data incubator to confirm data veracity and develop insights on how to design, deliver and evaluate stakeholder value based on the verified data.

Following a synthesis at the intersection of dynamic capabilities theory and stakeholder relationship management concept, this study introduces a data incubator to meaningfully deal with the big data management challenges, related to veracity and value of data.

Business incubators are advantageous to new venture legitimacy because they provide rich access to entrepreneurial resources, and their incubation networks can offer endorsement to incubatees. However, empirical evidence on this topic is limited, and the existing literature relies predominantly on the Western context. Given that not all developing country incubators have resourceful and reputable external entrepreneurial networks as in the industrialized countries, and that new ventures need to build legitimacy along cognitive and socio-political dimensions that require different actions to influence different stakeholders, this study investigates empirically how business incubators facilitate their incubatees to build legitimacy in a context where resource and reputation conditions are weak. The purpose of this paper is to clarify how business incubators perform legitimacy-building roles effectively.

A multiple case study of business incubators in Chongqing, a second-tier Chinese city, is presented. Using grounded theory, this paper draws its findings from a synthesis of interviews and secondary data of seven incubators and their ten incubatees.

The legitimacy-building role of business incubators is performed well in this research context. Evidence is presented that incubators play different roles in building different dimensions of incubatees’ legitimacy. Government-associated incubators play a salient role in building incubatees’ socio-political legitimacy whilst non-government related incubators shape their incubatees’ cognitive legitimacy.

This study contributes to the business incubators literature by revealing how incubators perform the legitimacy-building role when their resource endorsement is weak. The results suggest that incubators need to strengthen their ties with external stakeholders and that new ventures need to take key stakeholders into consideration when they select incubators to enter.

Institutional support at local, state, and national levels, including the services offered by business incubators, impacts women entrepreneurs’ venture creation and success. Yet, our understanding about the influence of an incubator’s attributes on women entrepreneurship remains limited. In this chapter, we develop a framework to analyze how incubator attributes encourage women’s entrepreneurship in the USA. We begin by discussing how homophily and signaling theories can help us understand whether incubators are using inclusive practices. Then, we draw a sample of 30 Impact Award winners from the International Business Incubation Association (InBIA), a global association of incubators, and we use three sources of data for our analysis and conclusions: incubator features and demographics, mission statements, and media coverage from Nexis Uni. Based on our findings, we find low levels of gender inclusive practices among the most impactful business incubators. We conclude by offering suggested practices to make business incubators more inclusive of women entrepreneurs.

This study aims to explore key factors and specific ways for the upgrade to hybrid incubators in the context of China. A hybrid incubator means that a technology-based business incubators (TBIs) can implement various distinct value creation processes with the integration of the advantages of non-for-profit and for-profit TBIs at same time as Chinese government now requires government-sponsored non-for-profit TBIs to be profitable self-sustainability with less dependent on direct public subsidies, aiming to motivate these TBIs to provide higher quality services for their tenant new technology-based firms (NTBFs).

This study conducts a single in-depth case-study of Tuspark Incubator (located in Tsinghua Science Park [TSP]) with categorical analysis.

Three factors, i.e. incubation subdivision, intermediary platform and proactive approach, are found to be essential for a formerly government-sponsored TBI’s upgrading. Incubation subdivision enables Tuspark Incubator to create multiple incubation processes with incubator characteristic variables of both non-for-profit and for-profit incubators; with the establishment of intermediary platform, Tuspark Incubator provides specialized business support and high-quality networking from relevant specialized service organizations external to the incubator; more proactive approach with equity investment on incubating firms from Tuspark Incubator help to generate social welfare and financial profit at the same time.

For the incubators’ managers, incubation subdivision enables TBIs to operate for-profit and non-for-profit processes at the same time and provides different specific needs; more open intermediary service platforms can leverage the full potential of the actors in innovation system and help TBIs to save resource when upgrading to hybrid incubators; proactive approaches nurture learning climate and entrepreneurship environment to enhance the successful rate on NTBFs inside incubators and provide main profit source for incubators. For policy makers, using proactive approaches including creating a good milieu for incubation on technology-based start-ups and the design of public guidance funds is increasingly crucial.

This research is a pioneering study on the key factors and specific ways for the upgrade of government-sponsored non-for-profit TBIs in China to hybrid for-profit and non-for-profit incubators.

Based on Chinese incubators as the research sample, this paper aims to examine whether and how incubators' entrepreneurial mentoring and financial support affect incubator patent licensing. Entrepreneurial mentoring functions through the buffering mechanism and financial support functions through the bridging and curating mechanisms.

A negative binomial model is used to empirically explain the relation between entrepreneurial mentoring or financial support and incubator patent licensing. In addition, a cross-sectional test is performed to explore whether province-level incubator support policies strengthen the effect of entrepreneurial mentoring and financial support on incubator patent licensing.

The results reveal that incubators' entrepreneurial mentoring positively affects patent licensing. In contrast, incubators' financial support has an inverted U-shaped relationship with patent licensing. In addition, the two relations are stronger when an incubator locates in a province with more incubator support policies.

The authors contribute to the literature on incubator performance by identifying an important but less discussed factor: entrepreneurial mentoring. Through the connection with mentors, tenants efficiently commercialize the value of their patents, facilitate patent licensing and expand the product market. Furthermore, the inverted U-shaped association between financial support and patent licensing shows that incubation support does not always have a linear effect on incubator patent licensing. Overall, this study provides evidence on the effect of incubator support on incubator patent licensing.

The global Islamic financial landscape is changing with rapid advances in technology. The increasingly tech-savvy demography is presenting both opportunities and challenges to the industry. With the advances in e-finance and mobile technologies, financial technology (Fintech) innovations emerged by combining the e-finance, Internet, social networking services, social media, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics. Fintech promises to reshape the Islamic financial landscape by improving processes’ efficiencies, cost-effectiveness, increased distribution, Sharīʿah compliance and financial inclusion. As far as the Islamic fund management industry is concerned, AI seems to be the keyword. Islamic fund managers have recently started to incorporate AI and big data analytics into their strategy in the process of making accurate decisions based on facts and figures, which eliminates any biases and personal intuition. This disruption in status quo is raising new issues, new concerns and new exciting opportunities. While disruption may carry negative connotations, the industry players have been embracing the innovation and potential revolution the technology could offer. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to discuss legal aspects of Fintech and its impact on the Islamic fund management industry in Malaysia. This chapter introduces a historical overview of Fintech and its evolution in the Islamic fund management industry. This chapter further provides an overview of the legal and regulatory aspects of Fintech with regards to the industry. Finally, legal issues and challenges are identified and discussed. Being a legal research, this chapter adopts a qualitative method by analysing the relevant literatures on the subject. This chapter is expected to provide an insight into the application of Fintech and its impact on the Islamic fund management industry in Malaysia.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test if the interaction between universities and spin-offs, as proxy of knowledge translation (KT), which is based in particular on negotiation, semantics and pragmatics, has a positive impact on spin-off performance – in terms of greater distance from the “valley of death” – and allows access to credit and financial instruments.

The authors adopt an appropriate nonparametric conditional efficiency approach for panel data. The authors provide a unique picture of the innovation environment in Italy using an original dataset. These data provide information regarding the intensity of interaction between universities and spin-offs along with financial balance datasheet of the spin-offs. The nonparametric approach is particularly suitable for nonlinear relationships typical for this type of data.

The results of the analysis confirm that the translation of knowledge, based on negotiation of interests, semantics of the text and pragmatism, favored by the interaction between universities and spin-offs, improves the productivity performance of the spin-off by allowing them to move away from the “valley of death”. Therefore, universities must pay particular attention to the way they work with spin-offs by making use of the translation of knowledge, based on semantics and pragmatism, in order to encourage an understanding of knowledge, sharing of interests among the partners and stakeholders of the spin-off, often belonging to different backgrounds. These are processes that favor the transfer and development of research outcomes to the market, improving the spin-off competitiveness of the territory and strengthening relations with universities and their stakeholders (banks and financial intermediaries, local and national politicians, institutions and the community at large).

Implications for research can be identified at policy and managerial level and refer to the effectiveness of the so called “Third Mission”, university entrepreneurship through the creation of profitable spin-offs which contribute to innovation, and to the socioeconomic development of the territory. In turn, spin-offs with good performances are more likely to have access to external financing to allow the growth of their business in the market. Further studies can investigate the organizational way of the universities that promote these virtuous results, distinguishing them by spin-off efficiency clusters.

For universities, the results make it possible to envisage organizational processes to support spin-offs that are important both for compliance with the regulations and for the Third Mission. Researchers, teachers and PhD academics have the opportunity to exploit the results of their innovative research on the market. Spin-offs and start-up founders should note that the results of scientific transfer can create value for the firm and the territory. Useful information also derives for banks and financial intermediaries that intend to improve the credit risk assessment of the spin-offs during the loan assessment phase.

The value of the work entails in offering a unique overview of university innovation, through an original dataset and a robust methodology. By adopting a different approach, the contribution of KT at national level was assessed, measuring the impact on the technical performance and on the probability of survival of the companies. Originality of the paper lies not only in the approach but also in the fact that this is the first attempt to use the KT as a key factor for the economic sustainability from a financial perspective of start-up companies.

While traditional Industry 4.0 is studied in the context of smart factories, the authors study it as a metaphor that represents the spill-over effects of digitalisation, high-speed internet, cloud-based super-computing on industry, countries, human resource development and national competitiveness. This chapter analyses the Industry 4.0 steps taken by the United States, Germany, South Korea and India. It compares strategic actions taken by these countries using a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis to understand the position of each country. The authors use Max Weber’s ideal types as a positivist frame of analysis for the country-level data and from this draws policy recommendations. Based on the current status of India and other countries, the chapter concludes by suggesting short-term, mid-term and long-term strategies to transform India into a highly competitive industrialised economy in the context of the fourth industrial revolution.

Based on an Israeli innovation incubators program, aims to describe a procedure to define relevant categories in order to reduce the complexity of representing the population of projects supported by an innovation program in a meaningful way.

Provides a concise description of the Israeli innovation incubators program and presents the characteristics of the data available. Introduces the analysis methodology and describes in detail its application to the specific data set and the classification scheme that it induces. Discusses the information that can be obtained based on this classification, and outlines some policy implications. Concludes with remarks regarding possible applications and extensions of the methodology.

Finds that the classification induced by the iterative category exclusion (ICE) procedure can serve as the basis for more sophisticated analysis using statistical tools such as regression analysis. Once the relevant categorization is obtained, it becomes easier to collect meaningful data about incubator performance for analysis at various levels of aggregation. The ICE procedure has the advantage that it does not give a priori preference to any category or to any relationship between categories, and does not require a priori identification of the categories that are to be kept and those that are to be deleted. Further, it does not need to classify categories under headings such as “scientific and technological” on the one side, and “sector applications” on the other. Both are seen as equal from the beginning to the end and thus avoid any bias in the process. The subjectivity inherent in the selection process is reduced, perhaps even eliminated. The same values provided the basis for the identification and quantification of overlap and proximities between the final categories, throwing some light on their mutual dependencies and interactions and leading to a level of representation from which strategic assessment and thinking can start.

The core principle of ICE is to eliminate categories that do not convey sufficient information to justify the additional complexity. This principle is universal and can be applied to a wide variety of situations that suffer from too much data and not enough information.

Recent years have seen a wave of immigration in western countries. Entrepreneurship can foster refugees’ integration in the labour market. Hence, the authors observe an emergence of incubators with social purpose, addressing the key challenges of refugee entrepreneurs. The purpose of this paper is to look at the particularities and the impact of business incubation on entrepreneurial development and embeddedness of refugee entrepreneurs in the host country by applying the theoretical lens of mixed embeddedness theory.

This paper is based on a qualitative case study approach exploring one business incubation model for refugee entrepreneurs in Germany. For a multi-stakeholder perspective, the data were collected through a participatory focus group workshop and semi-structured interviews of refugee entrepreneurs and incubator stakeholders (e.g. incubator management, mentors and partners) contributing to the incubation. The data collection extends over the duration of five months of the incubation programme.

The empirical results emphasise the impact of the business incubator on refugee entrepreneur’s development and embeddedness. In this analysis, the authors identify key themes of a particular incubation process addressing the lack of embeddedness and barriers to refugee entrepreneurs in the host country. From the results, the authors elaborate a particular business incubation process framework of refugee entrepreneurs.

The findings enhance the understanding how business incubation contributes to the embeddedness of refugee entrepreneurs in their new hosting environment. Thus, this research contributes to the existing literature by extending incubation model frameworks towards refugee entrepreneurship and embeddedness perspectives. Furthermore, the study emphasises the role of the incubator in the context of the dimensions of the mixed embeddedness of the refugee entrepreneurs.