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This chapter sets out to analyze the impact of the Covid-19 virus on the holidays provided by UK group tour operators (GTOs) and the implications for overtourism. With tourism arrivals expected to fall by up to 30% in 2020 and a slow return to pre-Covid-19 levels for 2021 and beyond, the industry is possibly suffering the loss of up to 100 million travel-related jobs (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2020). GTOs will need to assess and possibly change the way they do business to initially survive and subsequently build up tourism numbers in the coming years.

This chapter identifies how GTOs could alter their holiday proposition to reassure travellers including the challenges of operating international tours when airlines have reduced capacity, the need to consider alternative age demographics who are more likely to travel and assessing existing itineraries to visit rural or small town locations rather than cities where numerous itineraries travel to now.

Finally, this chapter discusses and describes the significance of the findings with insights about possible opportunities based upon the approaches taken by various countries to target potential holidaymakers and the need to create a ‘crisis management plan’ for current and future countries. This may result in operational adjustments to meet these new requirements including the changing outlook of potential customers and the possibility of offering domestic tours to meet the current demand.

Purpose – This chapter discusses the relationship between health insurance and hospitals’ decisions to adopt medical technologies. I focus on both how the extent of insurance coverage can increase incentives to adopt new treatments, and how the parameters of the insurance contract can impact the types of treatments adopted.

Methodology/approach – I provide a review of the previous theoretical and empirical literature and highlight evidence on this relationship from previous expansions of Medicaid eligibility to low-income pregnant women.

Findings – While health insurance has important effects on individual-level choices of health care consumption, increases in the fraction of the population covered by insurance has also been found to have broader supply side effects as hospitals respond to changes in demand by changing the type of care offered. Furthermore, hospitals respond to the design of insurance contracts and adopt more or less cost-effective technologies depending on the incentive system.

Research limitations/implications – Understanding how insurance changes supply side incentives is important as we consider future changes in the insurance landscape.

Originality/value of paper – With these previous findings in mind, I conclude with a discussion of how the Affordable Care Act may alter hospital technology adoption incentives by both expanding coverage and changing payment schemes.

The world is changing very rapidly with events that alter the landscape for students during a time when entrepreneurs are needed more than ever. This chapter explores trends in entrepreneurship research that are focused in areas of the entrepreneurial mindset, alleviation of poverty through entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, portfolio thinking about entrepreneurial venture types, the crucial nature of racial diversity, and the drive of women entrepreneurs. It also examines COVID-19’s disparate impact on smaller ventures and Black entrepreneurs, while highlighting its impact on spurring entrepreneurial innovations causing an entrepreneurial explosion. Most importantly, this chapter focuses on how the emerging research trends amidst the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted entrepreneurship educators to enact educational innovations. The chapter includes tools and tips to integrate into the changing nature of university programs and entrepreneurship curriculums facing a dynamic future.

Overconfidence in one’s entrepreneurial abilities is often assumed to motivate the behaviors of founders of high growth ventures. However, when founders encounter significant obstacles in the firm growth process, some begin to doubt their efficacy of their abilities to manage these growth processes successfully. In these circumstances, prior research suggests that such self-doubt creates significant cognitive constraints on an entrepreneur’s growth ambitions. Similar to other types of resource constraints, cognitive constraints are thought to impact firm performance outcomes negatively. Despite these claims, in this study, phenomenological analysis of the experiences of a group of entrepreneurs creating and managing high-growth ventures based largely in Silicon Valley suggests that a number of these entrepreneurs experience significant levels of self-doubt but still persist in growing their ventures. Yet current entrepreneurship theory provides limited guidance regarding how entrepreneurs overcome these self-doubts and persist in creating a new venture. To address these theoretical limitations, in this chapter, we examine the cognitive process through which entrepreneurs wrestle with self-doubt in order to overcome self-imposed, cognitive constraints on firm growth. Based on this analysis, we develop a process model using a unique sample of interviews with 27 high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurs who have received venture capital funding. This model suggests entrepreneurs overcome self-doubt by managing the emotional impact derived from the discrepancy between their ideal and actual selves. Furthermore, entrepreneurs engage in an active process of transforming negative mental states by leveraging their intentionality, engaging in forethought, taking consistent action, and relying on the support of others. Overall, we find that entrepreneurs display a high level of entrepreneurial agency when attempting to transform negative mental states in order to persist with their ventures. Implications of these findings for cognitive theories of entrepreneurial action are discussed.

How do ego-networks evolve? How does such evolution affect firms’ innovation output? This chapter uses a longitudinal sample of firms in the biotechnology industry to address these questions. We use social network theory to develop a model of the structure and dynamics of firms’ interorganizational research collaboration ego-networks. Using novel longitudinal methods, this chapter demonstrates how research collaboration ego-networks in the biotechnology industry change over time and how this evolution affects focal firms’ subsequent innovative output. The model is tested on a sample of 482 biotechnology firms over a span of 17 years (1990–2006). The results indicate the significant impacts of ego-network size, ego-network growth, and the inclusion of new members in the ego-network on the innovation output of biotechnology firms. Our results also suggest that enlarging ego-networks by adding new and diverse members presents significant management challenges.

Employing the notion of balanced growth postulated by competence-based literature, the present study submits that a firm’s growth strategy can be understood as its ability to manage the interplay of building and leveraging existing competence within the business context. The synergistic effects resulting from the creation of a self-reinforcing cycle of competence building and leveraging initiatives then drive the achievement of superior performance. To examine the validity and usefulness of this conception, we conduct a systematic investigation on the strategy-performance link of contract electronics manufacturers based in Taiwan, who have emerged as the competitive global supply base in electronics and computer industries. Empirical results based on a panel of business-level operating data show that while building product-related competence is essential to the contract manufacturer’s achievement of higher profitability, leveraging competence between subcontracting services and own-brand business will significantly enhance both profitability and sale growth. The implications of formulating a sustainable growth strategy for contract manufacturers in the context of horizontally configured industries, and suggestions for future research endeavors on competence-based management are discussed.

Our focus on external growth and related competence development as a process required observing and jointly examining a large number of variables that influence growth processes and, in particular, the complex relationships among them (Huber & Van de Ven, 1995). The heterogeneity of the phenomenon requires rich and deep descriptions aimed at assessing the abstractions and generalizations that can be meaningfully attempted (Davidsson, 2005, p. 56).