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A business school within a research university can improve the startup process and success on and near campus. The purpose of this paper is to show the mutual benefits to business and science students in learning about startups and to helping startups grow. The mutual benefit comes from the student understanding and the startup managing the complementary roles of inventor, entrepreneur, and investor.

A case analysis using participant observation, interviews, and document review of the Innovation Center in the College of Business at the Stony Brook University tracks the development of the Center’s educational, research, and consulting activity with engineering departments, incubators, and other support services on campus.

Inventor, investor, and entrepreneurship roles were supported and coordinated by science and business faculties and students in the university. This process, described in specific courses and programs for MBAs and BBAs, includes the contribution of business academic faculty, serial entrepreneur mentors and the scientists in partner organizations that also support startups inside and outside the university. The number of business plans written by students grew from 10 to 100 a year, startups begun from 1 to 5 a year, and established startups renewed grew from 10 a year to 20 a year over five year period.

This case can be useful to research universities and business schools that want to improve the startup process and success.

This study shows that the role of students in the business school in a research university is to transform inventive ideas from the sciences to innovations in the market place through entrepreneurial activity.

The purpose of this study is to explore the potential of women’s entrepreneurship to bring about greater gender equality. Understanding women’s entrepreneurship as a gendered process (Bird and Brush, 2002), the study presents the challenges encountered by women entrepreneurs as a result of gender ideologies. It documents structural barriers, discriminatory interactions and oppressive gender scripts and their effects on the women and their businesses. Acknowledging women’s possibilities for agency and resistance, the study analyzes how women entrepreneurs conform, contest or negotiate gender scripts and constraints, and looks at the consequences of these actions.

Drawing from elements of social interactionism and the doing and undoing gender theories, the authors use a feminist theoretic framework to guide analysis of qualitative data from two focus groups conducted with 19 women entrepreneurs in Colombia.

Gender ideologies were manifested in the forms of interrelated structural barriers that restricted women entrepreneurs’ access to resources. Social interactions represented spaces in which gender ideologies were reinforced, but also spaces women used to produce changes through resistance and accommodation strategies. Entrepreneurship was associated with positive changes toward greater gender equality, although negative consequences were reported.

Due to the limited sample, more studies across countries may be needed for the consolidation of a generalizable theoretical framework.

This study presents a feminist theoretic framework in dialogue with the lived experiences of women entrepreneurs. It observes the processes of change toward gender equality embedded in business development.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a perspective to further the understanding of gender entrepreneurship. This paper considers the situatedness of the gendered entrepreneur within diverse international contexts marked by different constitutions of gender identities and networks of power, both within the context of contributions within this special issue but also more broadly within the field of gender and entrepreneurship research.

The authors adopt a feminist perspective and analyse the different framings of identity within gender and entrepreneurship literature and their contributions to our understandings of the concepts of both power and gendered identities.

The paper finds that power and identity are configured in different contexts in ways that open arenas for future analysis.

The paper highlights the importance of considering masculinities within gender and entrepreneurship research offering support for further analyses of entrepreneurial masculinities by examining two studies that expose entrepreneurial masculinities as shifting subjectivities influenced by men's social power, but also by interactions between men and women and broader cultural contexts and transitions. In so doing, it contributes to the research agenda in relation to gender and entrepreneurship in different contexts.

To interrogate the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development” that dominates international development circles, by applying a feminist critical discourse analysis that prioritizes women's situated experiences as local stories.

Two existing frameworks for analysing women's entrepreneurship, namely the 5M (Brush et al., 2009) and the 8M (Abuhussein and Koburtay, 2021) frameworks, are used to examine the local stories of women in rural Ethiopia to provide a counter-narrative to the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development”. The local stories are derived from 16 focus group discussions and 32 interviews.

The findings provide a counter-narrative to the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development”, evident in Ethiopia and in international development generally, while demonstrating larger structural issues at play. They challenge entrepreneurship's solely positive effects. While women recognize the benefits of having a business, particularly in terms of financial gains, empowerment and social recognition, they also highlight negative consequences, including uncertainty, concerns for their own personal safety, criticism, stress, limited social life and fear of indebtedness and poverty.

Policymakers, scholars and development professionals are urged to reflect on the limitations of “entrepreneurship for development” and to consider the negative effects that promoting an acritical grand narrative of entrepreneurship could have on women's lives.

The article advances an innovative partnership between feminist analysis and established women's entrepreneurship frameworks to contest dominant assumptions in the fields of entrepreneurship and international development studies. It adds to the limited empirical evidence on women's entrepreneurial activity in Ethiopia, tests the adequacy of the 5M and 8M frameworks in the rural low-income context of Ethiopia, and proposes a 7+M framework as an alternative to study rural women's entrepreneurship in low and middle income countries.

Although research of entrepreneurial ecosystems has mainly focused on urban centers in developed nations, there is an emergent need to study the complexities of rural, regional and development contexts. Ecosystems in such settings are often characterized by the heightened importance assumed by environmental and social factors. This paper aims to document learning from participatory development and economic planning in the Galapagos, a setting in which the interplay between social, economic and ecological factors is critical.

This case study seeks to elaborate theory with qualitative data from an empirical context.

Reconstructed theory shows that in participatory development contexts, the entrepreneurial ecosystem constitutes a space in which competing interests contrast and conflict. Results from the Galapagos islands highlight the ability of local actors to successfully affect policy during local collaborative planning. The tensions between the economy, environment and society apparent in participatory dialogue indicate that a more nuanced approach to the interaction within entrepreneurial ecosystems is required.

This case study demonstrates the value of analyzing the processes and mechanisms for collaboration in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in sustainable development contexts. Results suggest implications for scholars researching entrepreneurial ecosystem networks.

Many countries around the world have now introduced entrepreneurship into their curricula and educational practices, starting at the elementary school level. However, recent studies show the relative (un)effectiveness of K-12 enterprise education on diverse learning outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to report on a research aimed at assessing the impacts of enterprise education on students’ entrepreneurial attitudes.

The authors conducted a quasi-experiment between May and June 2017 to assess the entrepreneurial potential of students at Elementary Cycle 3 (10–12 years) in Quebec, Canada. Relying on attitude theory, the authors used Athayde’s Attitudes toward Enterprise for Young People test, which assesses students’ entrepreneurial potential through four entrepreneurial attitudes (leadership, creativity, achievement and personal control). The experimental group consisted of 11 classes which had conducted an entrepreneurial project during the 2016–2017 school year (n = 208 students), while the 7 classes of the control group had not (n=151 students).

At first glance, data showed no difference between the two groups. Further investigation showed that private and Freinet (public) schools’ students, both from the control group, show significantly higher leadership scores than those of the experimental group. In-depth analyses also show that increasing the number of entrepreneurial projects significantly impacted three of the four attitudes assessed, although negligibly.

Taken together, those results question the relevance of single entrepreneurial activities in developing students’ entrepreneurial attitudes. They also suggest the positive impact of a progressive, constructivist pedagogy in developing such entrepreneurial attitudes. Moreover, the paper raises several factors likely to impact students’ entrepreneurial attitudes for further research.

K-12 enterprise education remains an understudied context, largely crossed by unproven statements. This research contributes to understand and give direction to educational initiatives targeting the development of young students’ entrepreneurial attitudes.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the literature that has sought to deconstruct this ideologically driven depiction by demonstrating how the existent enterprise culture in post-Soviet spaces not only challenges the depiction of the entrepreneur as a heroic icon of the legitimate capitalist culture but also opens up the feasibility of alternative futures beyond legitimate profit-driven capitalism. The starting point of this paper is that the enterprise culture is often viewed as inextricably related to the legitimate capitalist economy.

To unravel the nature of the enterprise culture in lived practice, this paper reports a 2006 survey involving face-to-face interviews with 90 entrepreneurs in Moscow.

Only 7 per cent of the Muscovite entrepreneurs surveyed pursue profit-driven legitimate entrepreneurship. The vast majority adopts social goals to varying degrees and operates wholly or partially in the informal economy. The outcome is to challenge the depiction of an enterprise culture and capitalism as inextricably inter-related and to open up entrepreneurship and enterprise culture in this post-Soviet space to re-signification as demonstrative of the feasibility of imagining and enacting alternative futures beyond capitalism.

These findings are tentative, as they are based on a small-scale study of just one post-socialist city. Further research is now required to analyse whether the lived practices of entrepreneurship and enterprise cultures are similarly diverse in other post-Soviet spaces as well as beyond.

This is the first paper to evaluate critically the assumption that enterprise culture is a part of the legitimate capitalist economy in post-Soviet spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the identity work of postgraduate students participating in an entrepreneurship training programme for life sciences. The paper aims to analyse what kind of entrepreneurial identities are constructed and in what ways in the context of the programme.

The paper relies on learning diaries and other written materials harvested from seven participants. Drawing on a social constructivist analysis, the materials were analysed by drawing attention to the kind of identities created, the contradictions that surfaced and how those were resolved in the written materials.

Two distinct entrepreneurial identities were constructed by the participants: the heroic and the humane. The first is the stereotypical role prototype that the participants experiment with. For the male participants this seems acceptable and normal. If they were in possession of more information, knowledge and skills they could identify with this heroic entrepreneurial identity. However, the female participants constructed an alternative identity; the humane entrepreneur running a low-tech firm with modest business goals or acting as an intrapreneur in an existing organisation.

Future research should consider entrepreneurship programmes as arenas for (gendered) identity work.

Entrepreneurship training should not only provide the participants with business knowledge and skills but facilitate their entrepreneurial identity work.

The paper contributes to understanding entrepreneurship education as a context for entrepreneurial identity construction and extends the understanding of the expected outcomes of entrepreneurship education programmes. The study demonstrates how entrepreneurial identity construction processes in the context of entrepreneurship training are gendered.

Increasingly, there is scholarly recognition that individuals' faith constitutes a background factor much like other antecedents conditioning entrepreneurial inclination. Yet, there is room to expand knowledge on how faith interrelates with psychological and social determinants of entrepreneurship, especially in under-researched contexts such as Nigeria.

This inquiry conceptualises associations between religiosity and (1) entrepreneurial self-efficacy, (2) entrepreneurial attitudes (3) and subjective norms as predictors of nascent entrepreneurship. For analysis, 1,259 observations of Nigerian students are assessed by structural equation modelling.

The path analysis showed that the religiosity–nascent entrepreneurship nexus is altogether mediated by entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial attitudes and subjective norms. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy is found to have the greatest impact on nascent entrepreneurship, followed by subjective norms and then entrepreneurial attitudes.

Theoretically, this study is one of the first to test all three dimensions of the theory of planned behaviour in the religiosity–nascent entrepreneurship nexus. It draws fresh attention to faith motivation and praxis, role-taking and attribution theory as explainers of the inherent correlations. Practically, the findings summon stakeholders to consider religious activity in the delivery of entrepreneurship programmes.

This study aims to explore how aspiring entrepreneurs navigate between their own individual self-concept and the organisational identity of the new venture during the process of new venture creation.

The study draws on three cases of aspiring entrepreneurs within a UK-based university incubator in the process of “becoming” entrepreneurs. Semi-structured interviews and secondary data were collected and analysed using a flexible pattern matching approach.

The data illustrated parallel identity and sensemaking processes occurring as the aspiring entrepreneurs navigated towards new venture formation. For the organisational identity process, three key stages were found to occur: referent identity labelling, projection and identity reification. Concurrently the sensemaking process made up of creation, interpretation and enactment were seen to enable identity transitioning mechanisms: cue identification, liminal sensegiving and recognition of formal venture boundaries, which led to the organisational identity being formed.

This study is exploratory in nature thus future research is required to clarify the relationship between identity work practices and the process of creating a new venture (Oliver and Vough, 2020). The paper is limited to successful instances of new venture formation, and though this helped to extricate the identity transitioning stages and mechanisms that have thus far remained implicit within the process of new venture creation, it could be extended to examine entrepreneurs who fail to set up new ventures. This limitation opens avenues for further research on identity formation in failed ventures (Snihur and Clarysse, 2022) and on how entrepreneurs negotiate contested identities (Varlander et al., 2020). Furthermore, entrepreneurs take different pathways to new venture formation (Shepherd et al., 2021) and while this study follows the journey of aspiring entrepreneurs who differed in terms of sector, education and prior entrepreneurial experience (Shane, 2003), future researchers could undertake a more in-depth ethnographic study including the effects of incubator setting and how these can be best supported, as this was outside the original remit of this study. Given the importance of the university incubator (Bergman and McMullen, 2022), its role in the construction of new venture identity is an interesting area for future research.

This study provides a practical contribution into entrepreneurship curricula and incubator training, emphasising the importance of understanding the relevance of the entrepreneur's self-concept in making sense of future venture identities. Through the findings of this study, the importance of cue identification and how aspiring entrepreneurs rely on these to carve out the identity of their budding venture is demonstrated. Incubator spaces may have a role to play in supporting aspiring entrepreneurs to reflect on and interpret feedback (liminal sensegiving) during the venture creation process. Furthermore, both educators and incubator managers need to be aware of the state of in-between-ness aspiring entrepreneurs will face as they carve out the identity of the budding venture. This study enables educators to advise aspiring entrepreneurs that there will come a point on the entrepreneurial journey when they need to emphasise boundary setting between self and organisation to enable organisational identity to be fostered and venture formation realised. This study advises incubator managers to consider whether support around business registrations and creation of business accounts should be provided earlier in the incubation programme to emphasise boundary setting between self and organisation. There is a fruitful avenue for future research to extend the work in this paper to fully understand how this might be taught and practiced in the classrooms.

By extricating the stages of organisational identity formation, often hidden within the new venture creation process, this study has framed new venture creation as a liminal experience and a visible site of identity work. This study presents a process model of the key identity transitioning stages and mechanisms in new ventures, by illustrating how aspiring entrepreneurs' sensemaking influences identity transitions during the process of venture creation.