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In today's competitive environment firms can seldom rely on their current products and services to secure their future success (Miller, 1983; Zahra, 1993; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996). Neither can they ignore their position in the market vis-à-vis their current and potential competitors (Barney, 2002). To win in the competitive global market, firms also have to continuously improve their internal processes in order to ensure that operations are efficiently performed (Carpinetti & Martins, 2001; Tompkins, 2001). These challenges may seem overwhelming and even threatening, but by generating more opportunities firms can increase the possibility of obtaining successful outcomes. This is based on the assumption that the discovery of new opportunities helps leverage a firm's value creation and ensures that the firm remains vital (Stevenson, 1983).

This chapter deals with the process perspective of entrepreneurship, that is, what prospective entrepreneurs should do and how they do it (the processes they use) to launch a new venture in the tourism field. The main purpose of this chapter is to explain what the entrepreneurial process is, the steps/phases to transit from idea to enterprise and the risks involved.

General review was conducted on conceptual issues and managerial aspects of the entrepreneurial process and legal issues.

This chapter highlights that the entrepreneurial process undergone by entrepreneurs is dual in nature, both in terms of action and thinking process. Given that the failure rate of new ventures is high, there is a need to focus on the importance of understanding the dynamics of entrepreneurship, the action process of the prospective entrepreneur and the potential risk impact.

This chapter is explorative in nature because the discussion is based on a general review.

Prospective entrepreneurs should follow specific steps, a rational process to establish their business venture and to protect its operations against any event. Thus, any new business should manage risks appropriately, as well as record insurance to cover for unforeseen events.

This chapter provides an overview of the entrepreneurial process and legal risk issues that may affect the success of a new venture. The hands-on approach is particularly useful in dealing with the entrepreneurial mind when exploring new business ventures in the tourism field.

Recognition of a profit opportunity requires a framework of knowledge to place information about a profit opportunity in a context where it can be recognized. The same information about a profit opportunity could be revealed to many people, yet only a few with the appropriate knowledge will be able to place this information into a context that suggests to them a profit opportunity. This paper discusses how entrepreneurs gain knowledge to enable them to be more entrepreneurial, and shows how an economy generates information about entrepreneurial opportunities. Entrepreneurship adds to an economy’s knowledge base, making it easier to recognize profit opportunities when they arise.

In recent decades, the concept of pro-poor tourism has emerged as one of the integral mechanisms that benefit the poor and the underprivileged sections of society. Eradication of poverty is a top priority of human development that is mentioned in the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Given the expansion of the tourism industry at present in India, the sustainability of this sector is significant, particularly in the rural and remote areas for the facilitation of income-generating opportunities to these vulnerable sections of society at large. The present research study aims to find out the various factors that determine the growth and expansion of the Indian tourism industry and to evaluate how such factors correlate with the alleviation of poverty in India. A panel regression is fitted to find out the nexus between the growth and expansion of the tourism industry in India and its impact on poverty alleviation standards. The selected dimensions, viz. number of tourists visited, per capita income at the state level, index of poverty as measured by headcount ratio, inequality index measured by GINI coefficient, economic specific variables such as literacy rate and infant mortality rate, and state of instability in states measured as by frequency of incidence of crimes in the region are being employed in the study. The estimated model reveals that the effects of tourism development have significant and bountiful outcomes in reducing poverty in India during the study period 2005–2018, as indicated by the estimated coefficient value of (−0.0655), controlling for the selected economic and state/region-specific variables.

Over the last 10 years, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developed countries have faced increasingly stiff competition in their local markets, which has put the survival of many of them at risk. To reduce their vulnerability, many SMEs have targeted sales to other countries. Recently, however, the pace and intensity of these firms’ export activities appear to have decreased, as their traditional markets (i.e., the United States and Europe) have been experiencing slow growth. This situation has led some SMEs to explore the possibility of exporting to less traditional countries presenting more opportunities. However, a good number of entrepreneurs remain hesitant to go down this road, in particular given the uncertainty that prevails in those regions and the risks they represent in terms of exports. This study, which was conducted with a sample of 582 Canadian manufacturing SMEs, reveals that two characteristics help explain the fact that some SMEs choose to export to higher risk countries, more specifically to Asia. These characteristics are a positive attitude towards risk-taking among managers and the implementation of certain risk management mechanisms.

The prevailing theories of entrepreneurship have typically revolved around the ability of individuals to recognize opportunities and act on them by starting new ventures. This has generated a literature asking why entrepreneurial behavior varies across individuals with different characteristics, while implicitly holding the external context in which the individual finds oneself to be constant. Thus, where the opportunities come from, or the source of entrepreneurial opportunities, are also implicitly taken as given. By contrast, we provide a theory identifying at least one source of entrepreneurial opportunity – new knowledge and ideas that are not fully commercialized by the organization actually investing in the creation of that knowledge. The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship holds individual characteristics as given, but lets the context vary. In particular, high knowledge contexts are found to generate more entrepreneurial opportunities, where the entrepreneur serves as a conduit for knowledge spillovers. By contrast, impoverished knowledge contexts are found to generate fewer entrepreneurial opportunities. By serving as a conduit for knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurship is the missing link between investments in new knowledge and economic growth. Thus, the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship provides not just an explanation of why entrepreneurship has become more prevalent as the factor of knowledge has emerged as a crucial source for comparative advantage, but also why entrepreneurship plays a vital role in generating economic growth. Entrepreneurship is an important mechanism permeating the knowledge filter to facilitate the spillover of knowledge, and ultimately generating economic growth.

The objective of this chapter is to identify the key characteristics of Global Services businesses that will thrive and achieve success in the future. These factors are integrated into three main pillars, which we refer to as the Triple-Win. The first and most obvious pillar is technology as a tool. The second pillar is the design and sustainability of the business model, without which the previous factor would be merely a cost and not an investment. And last but not the least, there is the purpose which gives meaning to the proposal, focusing on the human being and their environment. The DIDPAGA business model sits at the intersection of these three elements.