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Over the years, at the international level, the social construction assumption according to which women would be less innovative than men and, consequently, also less prone to be involved in innovative fields, since their educational path decisions to career path decisions, has long prevailed. This has resulted in a widespread lack of representation of women in more innovative sectors, in comparison to their male counterparts. In recent years then, if the pandemic has had an impact, at least for some specific socio-economic contexts, especially on those that can be typically considered as ‘necessity entrepreneurs’, it has to be said that it has been able also to generate some virtuous dynamics crosswise related to innovative issues. In particular, this chapter aims to go in depth into these issues from the perspective of innovative women entrepreneurs in the attempt to answer to the following questions: how does the socio-economic environment affect innovative women entrepreneurs? And, what are the unique experiences, achievements and contributions of innovative women entrepreneurs in Italy? In order to answer to these specific research questions, an analysis based on direct interviews with a sample of Italian innovative women entrepreneurs has been conducted.

Entrepreneurship education (EE) is critical for developing the skills of tomorrow's entrepreneurs and leaders. While significant research examines the content, student learning processes and outcomes, less studied are the entrepreneurship educators and their pedagogical preferences. Following a cognitive process model of decision-making, this study explores how self-efficacy, philosophy of teaching, entrepreneurship training and teaching experience influence entrepreneurship educator preferences to follow either a teacher-centric or a student-centric approach. This study also includes gender in a secondary analysis of the relationships.

The data were collected from 289 entrepreneurship educators in 2021, and fuzzy-set comparative qualitative analysis (fsQCA) was used to obtain configurations of conditions (causal recipes) that lead to teacher-centric or student-centric model. A secondary analysis explores whether there are different configurations of conditions when gender is added to the analysis.

The results of our fsQCA analysis reveal multiple configurations of conditions (causal recipes) that result in a preference for either a teacher-centric or student-centric approach to teaching entrepreneurship. The authors find that teaching experience is the main condition for the teacher-centric model, while self-efficacy and entrepreneurship training are the main conditions for the pathways leading to student-centric model. The fsQCA results also show that the configurations are affected when gender is taken into account in the analysis.

This study, one of the first of its kind, uses a configurational approach to examine pathways that contribute to the teaching preferences of entrepreneurship educators. This paper uses self-efficacy, teaching philosophy, teaching experience and entrepreneurship training as conditions to identify multiple unique pathways that result in either a teacher-centric or student-centric pedagogical model in EE. Notably, differences by gender are also found in this study.

Previous studies have shown how the nature of businesses and the strategies pursued by their owners are affected by the personality traits of their owners. These personality traits can be formed in the early stages of life due to experiences and the surrounding context, where religion is a particularly important aspect of this context. This study aims to explore how religion affects entrepreneurial activities through the personality traits created.

This study uses interviews with 43 Muslim entrepreneurs in Scotland to examine the role played by religion. This ensures that the national institutional context is kept consistent but also allows an in-depth examination of relationships, which are likely to be interlinked and recursive.

The traits created influence the nature of the entrepreneurial activities undertaken with the potential to harm and support the entrepreneurial endeavours. It is the combination of personality traits that are formed which have the greatest effect. As such, it is found that Muslim entrepreneurs display less openness and creativity associated with new ideas, but this does not reflect risk aversion rather hard work in itself is valued, and patience combined with an external locus of control mean entrepreneurial behaviours are not altered to boost poorly performing business activities.

For Muslim entrepreneurs in Scotland, their traits explain why growth may not be a foremost consideration of these entrepreneurs rather they may value hard work and meeting the ideals of formal and informal institutions associated with religion. For those seeking to support minority groups through the promotion of entrepreneurship, either they must seek to overcome these ingrained traits or alter support to complement the different objectives held by Muslim entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial trait and behaviour approaches are used to identify differing entrepreneurial profiles. Specifically, this study aims to determine which entrepreneurial competencies (ECs) can predict entrepreneurial action (EA) for distinct profiles, such as male versus female, start-up versus established and for entrepreneurs within different age groups and educational levels.

The research was conducted using a survey method on a large sample of 1,150 South African entrepreneurs. Chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID) algorithms were used to build decision trees to illustrate distinct entrepreneurial profiles.

Each profile has a different set of ECs that predict EA, with a growth mindset being the most significant predictor of action. Therefore, this study confirms that a “one-size-fits-all” approach cannot be applied when profiling entrepreneurs.

From a pedagogical standpoint, different combinations of these ECs for each profile provide priority information for identification of appropriate candidates (e.g. the highest potential for success) and training initiatives, effective pedagogies and programme design (e.g. which individual ECs should be trained and how should they be trained).

Previous work has mostly focused on demographic variables and included a single sample to profile entrepreneurs. This study maintains much wider applicability in terms of examining profiles in a systematic way. The large sample size supports quantitative analysis of the comparisons between different entrepreneurial profiles using unconventional analyses. Furthermore, as far as can be determined, this represents the first CHAID conducted in a developing country context, especially South Africa, focusing on individual ECs predicting EA.