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Purpose – In this chapter, we address the lack of sufficient entrepreneurship in multinational enterprises (MNEs) that seek to improve their ability to achieve national responsiveness. The main reason for this deficiency appears to be the transfer of proven routines from the home country, even when it is clear from the outset that these routines will simply not work and will require much more than a quasi-mechanistic ‘adaptation’ to the new environment.

Methodology/approach – Conceptual

Practical implication – This chapter suggests that MNEs need to close their entrepreneurial deficits in host countries, by allowing novel resource recombinations. These resource recombinations should lead to accessing fully the coveted host country location advantages that triggered entry in these countries and to success in the market place.

Originality/value of the chapter – Most of the contemporary international business literature has studied subsidiary entrepreneurship in the context of established affiliates abroad. Here, we argue that entrepreneurship is equally important in the setting of new foreign market entry. We identify entrepreneurial deficits as the main source of MNEs' failure when trying to achieve national responsiveness.

This chapter examines the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem and the knowledge transfer process involved, in the tourist municipality of Lagos, Portugal. Participatory action research is used to identify issues, antagonistic forces, and the system of governance which emerged in the creation of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The different roles of both public and private actors were identified. Despite a deficit of entrepreneurial culture and social capital, the main results show that participatory action research encouraged knowledge transfer among political actors, entrepreneurs, and academics, leading to the implementation of the basic conditions for an entrepreneurial ecosystem dynamic.

This paper aims to report on the level of entrepreneurial intent (EI) in southwestern Cameroon, by developing and using a novel scale that avoids the problems of construct confounds that exist with most EI scales currently in the literature. This scale is also used to measure EI in Canada, as a comparative example of the Western countries typical of previous EI research, to demonstrate the stability of the scale across different cultures.

Data are collected by survey of random participants in Jamaica and Canada. Factor analysis is used to refine the choice of scale elements from this survey. Nested structural equation modelling is then used to confirm the construct validity and to demonstrate construct stability across the two populations. The population scores are then compared by t-test.

A novel ten-item scale is developed and is shown to have a stable factor structure across the two populations. Using this measure, it can be newly seen that, contrary to the expectations for low entrepreneurial prevalence and intention expressed in the literature, there is actually no significant EI deficit in Cameroon.

Previous measures of EI in the literature have been seriously confounded by adjacent constructs in the same nomological net, such as beliefs, attitudes and expectations for future behaviours. The research approach taken here demonstrates how these confounds may have led to erroneous conclusions about EI in Cameroon and potentially in other countries. The major limitation of this study is the small sample size, which should be reinforced by replication or extension in future studies.

The development of a scale free of construct confounds represents an important step in the refinement of accurate measurement of this foundational construct in entrepreneurship research. This is underscored by the finding that EI in Cameroon may have been misreported in early research due to confounded measurement.

The purpose of this paper is to understand gender differences in entrepreneurial intentions as measured by perceived feasibility and perceived desirability, and to explore gender differences in perceptions of entrepreneurship education needs – in terms of programmes, activities or projects – to succeed in an entrepreneurial career from the university student's point of view.

Using data gathered from 3,420 university students in more than ten countries, and applying the Mann‐Whitney non‐parametric test, differences between genders and different intention groups were examined. To reduce the items regarding educational needs, factor analysis was used. Gender differences in educational needs were also examined via Mann‐Whitney Test.

The results confirm that compared to males, female students are less willing to start their own businesses. There are significant gender differences in terms of perceived feasibility and perceived desirability such that although they feel more supported by their families, females are less self‐confident, more tense, reluctant and concerned about entrepreneurship. In terms of entrepreneurial intention, there are fewer gender differences among students; however, differences relating to self‐confidence and family support still exist. Furthermore, students cited establishing entrepreneurial mentoring and an appropriate tutoring structure as the most needed entrepreneurial educational activity/program/project at an academic institution; this was rated higher by females compared to males.

The findings of this paper could help guide educators and policy makers in designing effective entrepreneurship programmes that are customized to respond to gender specific needs to increase entrepreneurial participation.

This study reveals the gender differences in perceived desirability and perceived feasibility which impact entrepreneurial intentions. Gender differences in the entrepreneurial programmes/activities/projects required at an academic institution to promote entrepreneurial participation among university students is also explored.

This study aims to study the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the relationship between outsourcing and product innovation in entrepreneurial ventures in a transition economy.

The data of 10,296 Vietnamese entrepreneurial ventures from the four rounds of the survey conducted by the General Statistics Office (GSO) of Vietnam to investigate the moderating effects of private ownership and government support on the association between outsourcing and entrepreneurial ventures’ product innovation performance. The Probit regression model is employed to estimate such associations.

Our research uncovered that the impact of outsourcing on the likelihood of product innovation is more significant for entrepreneurial operations characterized by a substantial degree of private ownership and government backing as opposed to those without.

The results of our research indicated that the resource-based perspective and extended resource-based view (ERBV) are essential in examining the impact of gaining resources or skills from external sources on the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises. These ideas have significance and importance not just in industrialized economies but also in countries undergoing transition. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial enterprises should have the ability to manage a wide range of resources and make decisions about which activities should be handled internally and which should be delegated to other parties.

Our findings also imply that entrepreneurial ventures should be able to control many resources and choose which tasks should be performed in-house and which should be outsourced to third parties.

By adopting and leveraging the resource-based view (RBV) and extended resource-based views (ERBV), our study developed a theoretical model about private ownership and government support for moderate outsourcing’s impact on entrepreneurial innovation in a transition economy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine persuasion and personality variables as predictors of entrepreneurial intention in a cross‐cultural sample.

Undergraduates in the USA and the Republic of Ireland completed measures of personal efficacy, achievement motivation, ambiguity tolerance, attitudes toward entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial intention.

The results suggest that the decision to become an entrepreneur comes about differently in different cultures. US participants appear to perceive entrepreneurship as a societally sanctioned and appropriate outlet for their achievement motivation. While achievement motivation correlated with entrepreneurial intention for the US participants, this result did not obtain for the Irish subjects. In both cultures, those who have come to believe that being an entrepreneur is consistent with their self‐image showed strong entrepreneurial intention independent of their other beliefs about entrepreneurship. This study suggests that recollections of positive interpersonal and mass media messages about entrepreneurship encourage entrepreneurial intention – but only for US participants. Other factors discussed in this report appear to mitigate the effect of such recollections for the Irish.

This study is part of a larger research program that includes following up on these participants at a later date. With longitudinal data, we will be able to track the relationship between stated entrepreneurial intention and later business startup.

This investigation compares factors influencing entrepreneurial intention in the USA and Ireland.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the course of entrepreneurship education (EE) research within the framework of entrepreneurship. The study is based on the results of previous research published in the annual double special issues of Education + Training (E+T) journal. In this context, it examines the role of EE at different levels of education; EE interactions and approaches; the effects of the variety of variables on EE; and the grouping of these variables into clusters.

The study uses literature review to categorize 59 papers into clusters based on the associations of different variables to EE which have been extracted from the annual double special issues of E+T journal. These special issues were published during the period of 2011–2018. All the reviewed papers were empirical in nature.

The study has identified 47 variables from 59 empirical papers, which have been grouped into 6 clusters around EE. Based on different levels of studies such as primary, secondary and tertiary levels, the examined papers discuss a variety of variables with reference to their positive, negative, significant or non-significant relationships to EE.

The paper demonstrates the progress of the knowledge produced with regard to EE research in recent years. It is among the very few studies to focus on the discrete collection of special issue papers.

Television and the media generally have raised the profile of entrepreneurs and we imagine them to be young, energetic and creative people. Research shows us that the older you are when setting up a business, the greater its chances of success. Here, Professor Tom Cannon puts things in a global perspective and tells us about the challenges that budding silver entrepreneurs face and what is being done in the north of England to remove those barriers.

This chapter explores how challenges potentially encourage refugees to engage in entrepreneurial activities and which adaptive mechanisms they employ in order to overcome the challenges. Semi-structured interviews with 12 refugee entrepreneurs were conducted in order to understand the underlying processes of the dynamics of challenges and adaptive mechanism within which the entrepreneurial outcomes emerged. The empirical findings of the study are evaluated in line with the parameters of the challenge-based model of entrepreneurship. A more nuanced picture of underdog entrepreneurs emerges along with a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial activities of refugees.