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Startups play a significant role in improving societies. This paper concentrates on the concept of “startups” and attempts to present a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon. Also, the focus of this paper is on investigating enterprising communities and the startup ecosystem in Iran.

The existing literature is carefully reviewed, definition and views are explored and the story of this phenomenon is told from the formation to the exit stage. The author elaborates the existing stages and challenges of startups in Iran. To do so, 65 tech startup founders are interviewed. Semi-structured interviews (SI) were based on previous studies mentioning the lifecycle of the startups, and were fully recorded. Moreover, secondary sources of data (SS) were used to support the findings.

The paper classifies the extant theories of startups in two levels, i.e. macro level, and micro and meso levels. Also, it defines some steps for the formation of startups and studies the Iranian startup ecosystem. Last but not the least the paper contributes to the startup ecosystem of Iran which is changing disruptively, especially in the last couple of years.

Findings of this research shed light on the existing ecosystem of startups in Iran, which is rarely studied in previous research. Lack of enough evidence in the existing literature of startup ecosystem in Iran was the most significant limitation of the research which increased the need for more investigation and elaboration.

The paper contributes to understanding the startup ecosystem in Iran, and the challenges.

This chapter addresses the impact of gendered social capital in developing countries to understand the barriers and opportunities to women's entrepreneurship with social capital development and also to examine factors influencing the development of social capital for women and how the identified factors benefit the creation of their entrepreneurial activities. This study follows a systemic literature review to achieve the purpose of the research by examining the selected articles in both English and Turkish, followed by factor comparison between developing, developed countries, and world datasets obtained from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database. The finding shows that social capital strongly impacts the entrepreneurial activities among women entrepreneurs in developing countries, especially in Turkey. Although the academic and practical studies on this field were started about two decades ago in Turkey, it has faced a radical increase in last 5 years and many practitioners and scholars working on these concepts. The clusters in English and Turkish resources are almost the same; however, the density and number of key terms are much lower in Turkish literature which shows a gap for Turkish researchers to publish more in this field to examine variables for better view about women entrepreneurship and social capital related to it.

The current research investigates the regional differences in benefiting from innovation toward growth ambitions in a sample of female entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Nordic region. A sample of 4,048 early-stage female entrepreneurs from these two regions who were participated in annual surveys of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor was selected for further analysis. The results of data analysis using hierarchical linear modeling (mixed models) revealed that innovation benefits growth ambitions of early-stage female entrepreneurs. Further, the regional differences affect the benefit of innovation in shaping growth ambitions, so that, in Nordic region, the early-stage female entrepreneurs expect more growth out of their innovation as compared with their counterparts in MENA region. These results have been discussed regarding to existing literature, and future research directions have been suggested based on the results.

Women Entrepreneurship has received increasing attention over the past decade. In particular, a new area dealing with women entrepreneurs in the developing societies. The aim of this study is how is women entrepreneurship in developing economies? More specifically, we are excavating various questions at the individual and institutional level. The results of this study contribute to understanding the importance of the context on women entrepreneurs’ activities. Additionally, it systematically provides a comprehensive framework at multilevel analyses to cover all aspects of women entrepreneurship in developing countries. Ultimately, knowing women entrepreneurship in developing countries helps policymakers provide a firm ground for self-employment of women.