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Based on the density dependence theory, this paper attempts to explore how two types of interdependence among firms located in the same national high-tech zones (NHTZs) – mutualism and competition – affect entrepreneurship in the NHTZs. The authors suggest that increasing firm density can help enhance legitimacy and form mutual networks. However, as the competition becomes fierce, the above positive relationship will weaken when the firm density exceeds a certain level. In addition, the authors are interested in whether the age of NHTZs would affect their sensitivity to legitimacy and competition and whether firm density affects entrepreneurship.

This article formulates two hypotheses from the theoretical deduction. The hypotheses are examined using the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with a unique, unbalanced panel dataset of Chinese NHTZs spanning from 2014 to 2021. Considering potential endogeneity risk among the variables, the authors attempt to lag variables and ultimately find the results are still robust.

Drawing upon the density dependence theory, the empirical results show firm density is conducive to promoting entrepreneurship, while the positive relationship between community density and NHTZs' entrepreneurship gradually weakens as the firm density surpasses a certain level. The dynamics between mutualism and competition have different impacts on NHTZs' entrepreneurship. In addition, the results demonstrate that the linkage between firm interdependence and entrepreneurship is stronger for younger NHTZs. Firm density has an impact on entrepreneurship through legitimacy and excessive competition effects.

On the one hand, the research period of this paper is 2014–2021, as the China Torch Statistical Yearbook only started to publish operating revenues in 2014, so the data period of this paper is relatively short. More research can be done in the future when more data is disclosed. On the other hand, the qualitative analysis cannot be conducted because of the limited data and materials. In future research, the qualitative analysis of entrepreneurial activities in NHTZs, such as questionnaires or case studies, needs to be supplemented, which will be an interesting direction.

Most existing research has not distinguished the differences between NHTZs (Wang et al., 2019), especially the differences in legitimacy and access to resources caused by the age of NHTZs. This article considers the heterogeneity between NHTZs, which helps to provide theoretical and practical evidence for a transition economy like China to make trade-off decisions on balancing absorbing new entrants with promoting the efficient allocation of resources based on the density and age of NHTZs.

Drawing upon density dependency theory, this paper enriches the literature on agglomeration and entrepreneurship with a new perspective and extends the study to NHTZs.

First, this paper provides new evidence on how agglomeration affects entrepreneurship from an ecological perspective with the help of mutualism and competition interdependence. Most studies have explored the role of agglomeration in entrepreneurship, focussing on social networks, knowledge spillovers or resource endowments (Acs et al., 2013; Capozza et al., 2018; Yu, 2020). Drawing upon density dependency theory, this paper enriches the literature on agglomeration and entrepreneurship with a new perspective and extends the study to NHTZs. Second, the emphasis of science parks has been primarily on qualitative or case studies (Salvador et al., 2013; Guo and Verdini, 2015; Xie et al., 2018). We have diversified the quantitative research between agglomeration and entrepreneurship by using panel data from Chinese NHTZs from 2014 to 2021. Third, most existing research has not distinguished the differences between NHTZs (Wang et al., 2019), especially the differences in legitimacy and access to resources caused by the age of NHTZs. This article considers the heterogeneity between NHTZs, which helps to provide theoretical and practical evidence for a transition economy like China to make trade-off decisions on balancing absorbing new entrants with promoting the efficient allocation of resources based on the density and age of NHTZs. Finally, this paper meticulously investigates the profound influence and underlying mechanisms of firm density within NHTZs on entrepreneurship. It discerns two distinct mechanisms at play: the legitimacy effect and the impact of excessive competition resulting from firm density. This comprehensive analysis significantly contributes to our comprehension of the intricate interplay between firm density and entrepreneurship, shedding light on the dynamics of competition and mutual benefits.

This study aims to understand the socio-cultural context of Indian women's high-tech entrepreneurial experience. Despite a small proportion of women entrepreneurs, and the traditional gender dynamics among the educated middle-classes that appears to be antithetical to female entrepreneurship; women-led high-tech start-ups are on the rise.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with women founders at an academic incubator in an elite Indian Institute of Technology. The study was based on the post-structural feminist approach that women entrepreneurs are embedded in their socio-cultural and institutional context. During data collection, the Coronavirus lockdown provided a natural experiment, highlighting entrepreneurial response to unforeseen obstacles.

It finds that the context is significant in constructing opportunity, and in navigating challenges of gender and entrepreneurship. Further, in the process of construction of an entrepreneurial identity, women innovators not only reproduce, but also modify their context. Also, the experiences with academic incubator indicate positive results both for gender dynamics and enhancing an emergent entrepreneurial culture.

The study highlights that women's high-tech entrepreneurship has considerable potential for enhancing women's status in society through the support of academic incubator. This has certain implications for policy.

It provides an insight in to the hitherto neglected issue of women's high-tech entrepreneurship in India, and argues that a study of “social embeddedness” not only highlights constraints for women entrepreneurs unique to that context, but also the potential of women's entrepreneurship in advancing women's agency and gender equality.

The study aimed to analyze the influence of network embeddedness on the innovation performance of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong Province.

A conceptual model of the influence of network embeddedness on the innovation performance of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong province is established, which takes the business model as the mediating variable and political association as the moderating variable. Multivariate statistical analysis and the MacKinnon confidence interval method were used to analyze 418 questionnaires.

The results show that both relational embeddedness and structural embeddedness have significant positive effects on the innovation performance of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong Province. The business model has a partial mediating effect between relationship embeddedness, structure embeddedness, and innovation performance of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong Province, respectively. Political relevance has a significant negative moderating effect on the relationship between the relationship embeddedness and innovation performance of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong Province, but the moderating effect on structural embeddedness and innovation performance of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong province has not been verified.

The study of this paper also has some shortcomings: very few data research samples exist; the external factors affecting the performance of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong Province need to be further refined. The research scale needs further improvement.

In this paper, embedding theory, transaction cost theory, resource dependence theory, rent-seeking theory, new institution theory and uncertainty management theory were integrated by system attempt to reveal the mediating and moderating roles of business model and political relevance, respectively, between network embeddedness behavior and entrepreneurial innovation performance of high-tech enterprises. The research conclusions expand the relevant research in the field of entrepreneurial innovation. At the same time, the research results provide theoretical support and reference for the innovative growth of high-tech enterprises and government behavior decision-making in Guangdong province.

Network embeddedness will have a profound impact on the entrepreneurial innovation performance of high-tech enterprises. Existing research has overlooked discussing this issue from the perspective of internal and external influencing factors within the enterprise. Therefore, this study addresses this issue by (1) introducing the business model as the mediating variable from an internal perspective of the enterprise, (2) introducing political association as the moderating variable from an external perspective of the enterprise and (3) 418 original questionnaires of high-tech enterprises in Guangdong Province were used to test the effect of the study variables.

The study aims at disclosing the evolution process to an entrepreneurial university in the government‐pulled triple helix in China through the analysis of MIT and Stanford model of “university‐pushed triple helix” in which academic institutions take the lead in regional innovation.

The paper is based on a case study of the Northeastern University (NEU), which is located in the Northeast China where there is a dominant government‐pulled triple helix and with the establishment of China's first science park in which a highly successful software company (Neusoft) was created.

The pathway to an entrepreneurial university begins with government‐pulled + industry‐university collaboration, to university‐industry collaboration + interaction triple helix. This may be followed by a gradually developing “university‐industry collaboration” in which companies fund academic research with potential industrial use, the beginnings of a university‐pushed triple helix.

The analysis of NEU exemplifies the emergence of the entrepreneurial university in China and provides strategic implications for policy makers in terms of designing the appropriate policy to support university enterprising strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the theoretical development of the content marketing concept and its integration into high-tech marketing theory, in entrepreneurial contexts and from a business model innovation perspective.

The paper provides a conceptual overview of content marketing and business model innovation concerning high-tech entrepreneurs.

The high-tech entrepreneurial content marketing (HIT-ECM) framework has five delineating elements with a small high-tech firm as the focal point: adapting content marketing in the business model, customizing content and customer profiling, organizational learning and experimenting with the business model, building strategic networks and content marketing and the small high-tech firm’s business model innovation. The HIT-ECM framework considers how high-tech entrepreneurs capitalize on their capabilities and use innovative marketing strategies to sell their high-tech solutions under unpredictable conditions and limited resources.

From a managerial perspective, HIT-ECM poses five questions managers should ask themselves when they adopt content marketing and integrate it into their existing business models: how can content create value, how novel content development activities reflect on innovating the business model, how will content development reflect on the business model structure, who is involved and what are the revenue streams of content development.

This is an original paper that presents the HIT-ECM framework for high-tech entrepreneurs to use content marketing and capture customer value through every aspect of their business operations, as well as updating and innovating their business models.

The paper aims to unravel the congruence of entrepreneurship and India’s excellence in information technology (IT). Considering the fact that entrepreneurship is a multifaceted concept encompassing a complex set of contiguous and overlapping constructs, the study takes into consideration interlinkages between the institutional environment, the nature of the industry and the responses and expectations that influenced entrepreneurship. The study complements these factors by analysing the sequential transformation of the Indian IT industry owing to the advent of outsourcing opportunities and concomitant ramifications on entrepreneurial activities. In effect, the study highlights the endogeneity in the system wherein entrepreneurs have continually adapted to the industry dynamics resulting in its significant expansion.

The methodology adopted is the historical research method. Fundamentally idiographic, it helps in understanding contemporary issues, how they arose and how their characteristics unfolded over time. To this end, historical contextualisation has been carried out as an interpretative or analytical activity to capture the dynamic process of entrepreneurship. The idea was to capture the broad consequences of entrepreneurial interactions and processes over a long-time horizon classified into six different phases since inception. The historical contextualisation enabled us not only to pinpoint the disequilibrium processes at each phase of development that ushered in structural changes in the industry but also to identify and examine the complex interactions between the various factors that led to the growth of entrepreneurship.

Findings reveal that the Indian IT industry has undergone a series of disruptive changes since inception. Disequilibrium in the market plays a critical role in the initiation of entrepreneurship. In the formative phases, disequilibrium is initiated by the “adaptive” responses of the entrepreneurs, whereas in the advanced phases, entrepreneurial process is augmented by the “creative” responses resulting in the perpetuation of disequilibrium. Such shifts in entrepreneurial responses indicate a gradual progression from “gradient” to more “heuristic” search efforts on the part of the entrepreneurs. This progression testifies the perpetuation of entrepreneurship in imparting sustainability to the growth momentum of the industry in the foreseeable future.

The study attempts to fill three important gaps in the literature: First, enrich the Austrian economics with empirical findings. Second, integrate two different strands of literature on entrepreneurship and evolution of India’s IT sector using unique configuration. Third, extend the literature on entrepreneurship in the Indian context to capture entrepreneurial prudence in the Indian IT sector and thereby enrich the literature with newer findings and richer insights.

Analysis of factors that imparted entrepreneurial prudence in the Indian IT sector can endow policymakers with valuable information for enhancing growth in industries that are having a close association with the IT industry in the “product space”.

The study is original on account of the unique configuration that it has adopted to unravel the complexity embedded in the concept of entrepreneurship considering a long-time horizon of six decades since inception which includes the analysis of disequilibrium; the entrepreneurship-institution interlinkages; the nature of the industry; and the role of outsourcing.

While the numbers of, and research on, women entrepreneurs have accelerated radically in recent years, the rates of women entrepreneurs remain significantly lower than men's. Research has shown that subjective perceptual variables have a crucial influence on the entrepreneurial propensity of women and account for much of the gender differences in entrepreneurial activity. The paper aims to describe three studies that addressed gender differences in entrepreneurial perceptions, testing predictions derived from Schneider's Attraction Selection Attrition (ASA) model.

Each study focused on a different subject population with different entrepreneurial activity. The first was a national telephone survey that involved 514 Israeli adults. The second involved 313 Israeli management students who responded to a self‐report questionnaire. The third involved interviews with 101 Israeli small business owners.

The results of the first study showed few gender differences in entrepreneurial traits and values. The results of the second study showed large gender differences in the willingness to start a business among management students and smaller differences among students who intend to start a business. Gender differences were far smaller among actual business owners. Alone and together the three studies support Schneider's ASA model.

The practical implications of these findings are addressed.

The paper provides valuable information on gender differences in entrepreneurship.

The objective of this article is to map and assess current evidence in women's technology entrepreneurship in business incubators with the aim of producing a conceptual framework that will allow us to understand how gender shapes the life of women technology entrepreneurs.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review. The data set comprises 49 publications, including peer-reviewed articles and prominent book chapters. These are first categorized according to their feminist approach and second analysed using an inductive thematic approach to map dominant concepts and research methods.

The authors develop a framework with four dimensions: (1) antecedents, (2) challenges, (3) outcomes and (4) solutions. The authors show that current literature mainly focuses on the challenges faced by women technology entrepreneurs in incubator settings. Although liberal feminist research is present, social feminist perspectives dominate, with poststructuralist research as a close second. Interestingly, current research has not focused much on individual characteristics; in other words, the baggage that women bring with them in terms of prior experiences is hardly investigated, even though there is general agreement that socialization shapes women's experiences of and responses to gender challenges.

The authors contribute to the literature in the following ways: The developed framework assists in understanding how gender is an overarching factor that shapes every facet of the life of a women technology entrepreneur, and how incubator environments intensify gender issues. Indeed, being in an incubator environment adds an extra layer of gendered conditions, thus intensifying the challenges that women meet, creating a “triple masculinity trap”. The review highlights that little is known about how early conditioning shapes women technology entrepreneurs' reactions to the gendered conditions they meet and that there is a lack of research on how women “do entrepreneurship”.

Situated within a context where high-skilled migration is increasingly being featured in policy debates around the world as part of strategies to foster innovation, this chapter examines the ways highly skilled entrepreneurs in tech traverse their entrepreneurship and their subsequent migration via business accelerators. Business accelerators, which are not just promoted as pre-seed funds in financial circles, but also by migration policy as sponsors of migrant innovation, play an important role in the lives of young migrant ventures. However, based on interviews with entrepreneurs that used policy-endorsed accelerators in the United Kingdom, this chapter emphasises that both finance and migration policy considerations are just tiny specks in a larger picture. This chapter shows the boundary-fluid lives entrepreneurs in tech lead, and puts forth that it is the symbolic capital that they amass through their active use of accelerators, that they then convert to economic value. Consequently, it is argued that discussions around social integration of migrants into ‘mainstream’ society need to be viewed with a new lens, as the symbolic capital thus accrued, is at a truly transnational level.