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The start of the second decade after the transformation process began is an appropriate time to reflect on some of the emerging policy issues affecting small business development. While emphasising that setting up, operating and developing businesses results from the creativity, drive and commitment of individuals, rather than as a result of government actions, the conditions that enable and/or constrain entrepreneurship are affected by the wider social, economic and institutional context, over which the state has a major influence. In this regard, a key point to stress is the variety of ways in which government can affect the nature, extent and pace of small business development in an economy, rather than narrowly focusing on direct support measures. As a result, when considering the question of policies to support small business development, it is necessary to consider the implications of a range of government policies, institutions and actions for the environment in which small businesses can develop, instead of just focusing on direct interventions that are specifically targeted at small businesses. This is because any benefits accruing from the latter may be more than outweighed by the negative effects of other government policies and actions and those of state institutions. This applies in mature market-based economies as well as in those at various stages of transition, although the transition context typically adds further dimensions.

Robots come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from manipulators in the industrial assembly line, to house cleaners, and to carebots of the elderly and sick. In recent years entertaining robots have been developed to engage adults and children into playing and learning. There are however no robots that have been specifically designed to entertain pets. The purpose of this paper is to present a prototype developed to engage pets into outdoor playing.

A prototype that can engage a dog or a cat into playing was designed, built, and tested by a group of senior students. The enclosure of the prototype has the shape of a round shell. Within this shell there is a sensor interfacing unit, which can interpret sounds generated by the animals, and a light and sound system designed to interact with the animals.

The testing results showed that the prototype was able to fulfill requirements for outdoor playing, such as being waterproof and able to travel through grass. Testing of the individual sensor interfacing circuits demonstrated the interactive capability. Dogs were chosen to be the subjects to be entertained. However, it is envisioned that a smaller version of this prototype can be suitable for cats.

This is the first prototype that explores ways to entertain pets when their human owners are absent or busy. The prototype developed is a good start for any intelligent robotic systems specifically designed to entertain pets.

This paper aims at advancing a pragmatist perspective on entrepreneurial opportunities as an alternative to the traditional and predominant constructivist and objectivist perspectives. To this end, this paper advances a pragmatist definition of an opportunity and draws from empirical evidence to propose a pragmatist model of opportunity conception and exploitation.

A review of the entrepreneurial opportunity and pragmatism literatures yields a definition of an opportunity as a dynamic and unfolding experience which an entrepreneur conceives as a general market need to exploit it for financial or social gain. Drawing from this definition, and with the aim of developing a pragmatist model of an opportunity, a case study approach is applied to three radically innovative services conceived and developed by three high-performance computing (HPC) centers.

In each of the three cases, an entrepreneurial HPC center conceived a new, general market need (opportunity) and then acted to exploit it. Through its action, the HPC center learned something that enabled it to address barriers, develop an improvement or otherwise reconceive the opportunity. In turn, the HPC center learned more about and advanced the opportunity, and then acted again. After launching a new service based on the opportunity, the opportunity continued to evolve in response to the HPC center’s efforts and to market forces.

The pragmatist perspective and model of an opportunity can serve as a foundation for future pragmatist research into entrepreneurship and innovation. To this end, future studies could extend the model by examining in greater detail the acting-learning-reconceiving cycle, by exploring how an opportunity evolves and is reconceived after market launch and/or by investigating opportunity conception and exploitation within other types of markets.

From a pragmatist perspective, an opportunity is not some discrete object to be discovered. It is emergent and dynamic, and to the extent that it is “created”, it is never complete or finalized. It is experienced by the entrepreneur, and it continues to evolve, even after it has been launched as a new good or service.

The paper proposes novel value by advancing a pragmatist perspective on entrepreneurial opportunities. Such a perspective is an alternative to the constructivist and objectivist perspectives that have framed research into opportunities. The paper also proposes novel value by drawing from case study findings to propose a pragmatist model of opportunity conception and exploitation.

A debate on whether new ventures should be supported with public funding is taking place. Adopting a position on this discussion requires rigorous assessments of implemented programs. However, the few existing efforts have mostly focused on regional cases in developed countries. To fill this gap, this paper aims to measure the effects of a regional acceleration program in a developing country (Medellin, Colombia).

The economic notion of capabilities is used to frame the analysis of firm characteristics and productivity, which are hypothesized to be heterogeneous within the program. To test these relationships, propensity score matching is used in a sample of 60 treatment and 16,994 control firms.

This paper finds that treated firms had higher revenue than propensity score-matched controls on average, confirming a positive impact on growth measures. However, such financial growth is mostly observed in service firms rather than other economic sectors.

Further evaluations, with a longer period and using more outcome variables, are suggested in the context of similar publicly funded programs in developing countries.

These findings tip the balance in favor of the literature suggesting supportive programs for high-growth firms as opposed to everyday entrepreneurship. This is an insight, especially under the context of an emerging economy, which has scarce funding to support entrepreneurship.

The quality of institutions matters for firm growth. Yet, there is a research gap in controlling for moderating effect of size on institutions and firm growth in transitional context and especially in post-conflict economies. Building on institutional theory, this research aims to explore the influence of different types of institutional variables (taxes, corruption, administrative, finance and other barriers) on the growth of firms in Kosovo, while controlling for the firm size moderating effect.

The research uses linear regression analysis based on a survey with 451 owner-managers of growing small firms in the post-conflict economy of Kosovo.

Corruption and administrative burden are crucial factors that influence firm growth. Corruption is found to have a negative effect, and when moderated by the size of the firm, it becomes positive, suggesting that larger firms make use of informal institutions and create links with public officials to manage institutional deficiencies. This size interaction with administrative barrier variables becomes positive. Other control variables (export status, separation of ownership and control, membership in business association) suggest that managerial-level variables have a positive impact on firm growth. The human capital variable specifically indicates that companies compensate for a deficiency in formal education by providing additional training for employees and their managers.

Future research based on qualitative research can contribute to a greater understanding of how larger firms use resources to overcome barriers, and to align their business strategies in the weak post-conflict environments.

This research extends current understanding of how institutional variables interact with firm size and impact firm growth. It also provides implications for policymakers and entrepreneurs/managers for improving the growth of SMEs, and for aligning firms with the institutional environment in post-conflict countries.

This chapter is based on experiences from two field studies, conducted in Tanzania and Pakistan, with a focus on women entrepreneurs. When conducting research in the global south, there are several ethical challenges to carefully consider, especially when research involves vulnerable groups of people. The aim of the chapter is to shed light on the complexities of power dynamics and to reflect on how to handle ethical dilemmas that may arise. Stories of women I met during the field work are placed at the centre and used as starting points for reflections on power dynamics. These stories lead to a discussion on whether it is legitimate for (privileged) Westerners to engage in research in the global south. The value of ethnography and auto-ethnography within entrepreneurship research is thereafter discussed in hopes of assisting future studies, where different power structures have to be considered.

Women entrepreneurship has grown significantly all over the world, and it is widely established that entrepreneurship is important for economic growth and wealth. Despite those facts, women’s participation in entrepreneurship is lower than men’s in almost all societies. Those phenomena get the attention of scholars from diverse disciplines, all of them interested in the behaviour and profile of female entrepreneurs and their business success rates. Several isolated factors were studied, with positive and negative effects on each stage of the entrepreneur process, for women entrepreneurs, so the purpose of this research is identify, classify by their impact and organise those factors in relation to the stages of the entrepreneur process.

The literature on factors affecting female entrepreneurship produced since January 2010 until October 2015 is analysed to define entrepreneurial success, identify factors affecting success at each stage of the entrepreneurial process and propose and organise those factors at individual and environment levels.

Several factors affecting female entrepreneurial success at each stage of the entrepreneurship process were found and organised at the internal (individual), micro, meso and macro environment level. In the literature reviewed, the most considered factors are: at the internal level, human capital, education and experience, with effects on the opportunity identification stage of the entrepreneurial process, and at the micro environment level, access to resources with effects on the opportunity recognition, acquiring resources and entrepreneurial performance stages, both with influence on quantitative and qualitative indicators of success.

This paper proposes an integrated classification and an array for all those factors that have an influence on women’s entrepreneurship and its success, relating those to the entrepreneurship process.

The main objective of this paper is to analyse the influence of environmental factors on entrepreneurship at the Spanish regional level, using institutional economics as the theoretical framework for the research. Additionally, this work aims to emphasize how environmental conditions have different effects according to the gender of entrepreneurs.

Regional panel data (19 Spanish regions and the 2006‐2009 period) from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), specifically from the Spanish National Expert Survey (NES) for environmental conditions and the GEM Adult Population Survey (APS) for entrepreneurial activity were analysed within a fixed effects model with panel corrected standard errors.

The main findings of the study indicate that both informal (cultural and social norms, perception of opportunities to start‐up and entrepreneur social image) and formal factors (intellectual property rights) influence entrepreneurship, but the informal are more determinant than the formal. Concerning the gender issues, informal and formal institutions are also determinant, but female entrepreneurship is significantly associated with the women's support to start‐up, whereas primary and higher education are associated only with male entrepreneurial activity.

The results of the research should be interpreted carefully, because the availability of data constrained the analysis to a time period that is not reflective of the economic cycle; on the contrary, the data correspond to a period of recession, and thus the results cannot be generalized. Also, the study could extend the analysed period and compare the obtained results with international data, considering the global number of participant countries in the GEM Project.

The study provides a methodology to analyse the environmental factors for new firm creation at a regional level, combining GEM data and institutional economics.