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Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.

The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.

Under the unique context of COVID-19, this paper aims to analyze how the Government of Pakistan (GoP) provides financial and non-financial support to women entrepreneurs in Pakistan. Drawing on the resource-based theory of entrepreneurship (RBTE), the study advances the understanding of resources and grants offered by GoP to women entrepreneurs to help them in business survival.

The study adopts qualitative research method to address the questions: how does the Pakistani government respond to issues faced by women entrepreneurs during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what assistance and initiatives were implemented by GoP? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty on-job government officials related to the entrepreneurial sector in Pakistan.

The paper reveals that during the pandemic, GoP keenly communicated with women entrepreneurial representatives to comprehend their business challenges. In addition, waivers and incentives were provided to support their business activities. GoP further invited women entrepreneurs to contribute their knowledge and give suggestions in policy making.

Lots of research have been conducted to identify the issues faced by women entrepreneurs during the pandemic. However, the specific strategies, policies, and support provided by the governments to address these issues have often been overlooked. This paper fills such gap with focus on the governing bodies and policymakers in Pakistan towards women entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 crisis.

Transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies is a fairly new concept with respect to new ventures in such challenging economic environments. Formal institutional voids are sometimes held up as a reason for the difficulties present in distressed economies, along with exogenous shocks and other upheavals. In this research, the authors seek to contribute empirically and theoretically as to ways in which formal institutions voids can be filled by a culture developed by transitional entrepreneurs. Indeed, in transition economies, formal institutions need to be enhanced by informal institutions to control corruption and other misbehavior by authorities. Iranian economists emphasize these essential reforms to be able to manage current difficulties, yet top down policies cannot help transitional entrepreneurs benefit from the country’s value-adding cultural heritage to informally address this. To study this, qualitative research methods were used to interpret transitional entrepreneurs’ ideology and ethical routines as the ingredients of a commercial culture that can establish soft law that substitutes for formal institutions. This helps to reduce the disfunctionality of formal institutions in distressed economies.

A thematic analysis interviewing key Iranian entrepreneurs and economists is conducted. Also based on an interpretive paradigm, a hermeneutic cycle has been carried out on selected texts. Results have been verified throughout related literature as to come up with a solid synthesized interpreted outcome.

This paper contributes to theory from a new perspective by discussing transitional entrepreneurship and navigating a distressed economy; in which, ideology and ethics as the ingredients of soft law (Newman and Posner, 2018) are discussed as the base to further develop a commercial culture that fills voids of formal institutions. The formal–informal institutional cycle in distressed economies as the major difficulty entrepreneurs face (Peng and Luo, 2000) is important, because they try to increasingly enhance their move toward a market orientation (Bruton et al., 2008). The authors contribute as to how transitional entrepreneurs can complete this process of adaptation and also the fact that those informal institutions do actually respond to those adaptations. The other contribution is to enrich theories about institutions from the point of view of culture. Knowing these facts helps transitional entrepreneurs, because in distressed communities, formal institutions’ function has an important effect on economic performance (Amorós, 2009). This research’s contributions shed light to help government leaders understand the pros and cons of their actions forced on the industry. As it has been characterized in this research, it can turn in to new formal set of legitimacies (Ahlstrom et al., 2008) to root out corruption and help set the economy on a path to innovation and new venture creation.

Transitional entrepreneurs can depend on the less formal cultural-cognitive aspect of ethics and ideology. These entrepreneurs can be working on the burgeoning private sector, who want to connect with the outside effectively to overcome an economy in distress. Transitional entrepreneurs may face governmental institutional intermediaries as a barrier. Formal intermediaries tend to benefit from inefficiencies caused by hierarchal orders and will improve informality in order to overcome difficulties. In this research, institutional theory from the third pillar of the cultural-cognitive sheds light on transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies, where inquiry is to fill voids of formal institutions as a process of possible linking between new generated soft law derived by beliefs, ideology and professional morality in order to influence (old) legitimacies. The research’s focus evolves on values transitional entrepreneurs utilize to build informal institutions and then impact further on formal institutions to handle distressed communities. This theoretical background expands on subsections to define conceptual building blocks for the study, essential aspects such as individuals as transitional entrepreneurs, the values they utilize to generate soft law, informal institutions and soft law, to manage voids in formal institutions and legitimacy building aspects in policy agenda setting for transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies.

Even though sustainable entrepreneurship has increasingly received researchers’ attention in recent years, the topic remains rather under-researched in natural resources’ rich Gulf countries such as Oman. Hence, this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is one of the first attempts to assess the state of sustainable entrepreneurship development in Oman from a multi-stakeholder perspective.

This paper uses a qualitative research approach where in-depth semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 respondents representing relevant stakeholders of sustainable entrepreneurship development in Oman. The interviewees included four sustainable entrepreneurs, four policymakers and four educationists representing entrepreneurial skills development institutes in Oman.

This papers’ findings highlight that despite some positive improvements, several critical challenges remain, which hinder sustainable entrepreneurship development. The authors further found the role of FinTech to be critical in this concern by all stakeholders, though its usage and acceptance remain low. Also, the costs associated with the post-carbon (sustainable) economy and different profitability evolution have resulted in a slow change in the policy development in this concern. From an educational (skills development) perspective, a lack of context-specific training programmes and culture-based hesitations appeared to be hindering achieving sustainable entrepreneurship possibilities in Oman. The nascent entrepreneurial ecosystem, bureaucracy and lack of human capital (attraction as well as retention) appeared to be significant challenges for entrepreneurs. Finally, the findings highlighted the need for cross-sector collaboration with clear benchmarks for effective policy development concerning sustainable entrepreneurship in Oman.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first academic study explicitly highlighting the state of sustainable entrepreneurship in Oman by incorporating the development initiatives as well as the major challenges in the analysis. Secondly, this study is also a pioneering work specifying the interlinkage between financing (FinTech), policy initiatives and skills development and the development of a sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem in an under-researched context of Oman. Finally, the transition to a sustainable economy is challenging in natural resources’ dependent economies like Oman, as it needs to be supported by the mindset change in the larger society (legitimacy). In this concern, this paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is one of the first academic endeavours to also specify the role of legitimacy from the perspective of different stakeholders (and larger society) for sustainable entrepreneurship development in such contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to review the utilization of game theory in the entrepreneurship literature. Game theory can potentially be employed to assess strategies incentivizing productive entrepreneurial activities and subsequent economic development. Therefore, the author reviews entrepreneurship articles and explores the application of game-theoretic models and concepts in the literature.

First, the author provides an overview of the entrepreneurship ecosystem concept, highlighting key challenges in its study. The author also briefly highlights successful applications of game theory in the innovation literature. Second, the author systematically reviews and synthesizes entrepreneurship research employing game-theoretic models and concepts. The author's objective is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the use of game theory in entrepreneurship.

Broadly, the author categorizes entrepreneurship-game theory articles into three groups based on their scope and purpose: entrepreneurial policy applications, inter-firm applications and entrepreneurship theory applications. Entrepreneurial policy applications include entrepreneurs and the government or policy as the main players in a game. Inter-firm applications encompass games between entrepreneurs and other private entities. Entrepreneurship theory applications include articles that utilize game theory to advance the author's understanding of entrepreneurial behavior and/or mechanisms in the market.

To the best of the author's knowledge, no previous paper has reviewed the use of game-theoretic approaches and models in entrepreneurship literature. This study addresses this research gap.

Most feminists policies are aspirational. Deficiencies include vague terms of what constitutes ‘feminist’ within policy, ambiguous investment criteria, lack of consultation and the use of the binary definition of gender negating gender-diverse people (Tiessen, 2019). The purpose of this study is to identify parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policies and to advance recommendations to operationalize these policies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled fragilities in the socio-economic gains that women entrepreneurs have achieved. Gender-regression is, in part, the product of entrepreneurship policies that fail to recognize the nature and needs of women entrepreneurs. To inform recovery measures, this article considers two research questions: what are the parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policies? and how can parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy be operationalized in pandemic recovery measures? To inform the questions, the study draws on the academic literature and thematic analysis of three collective feminist action plans to operationalize ten parameters that characterize feminist entrepreneurship policy.

Supplanting ‘feminist’ for women in the construction of entrepreneurship policies, without specifications of how parameters differ dilutes government's efforts to achieve gender quality and women's economic empowerment. To inform policy, recommendations of three feminist recovery policies clustered under seven themes: importance of addressing root causes of inequality; need to invest in social and economic outcomes; economic security; enhancing access to economic resources; investment in infrastructure; inclusive decision-making; and need for gender disaggregated data to inform policy. Differences in policy priorities between collective feminist recovery plans and the academic literature are reported.

The parameters of feminist entrepreneurial policy require further interpretation and adaptation in different policy, cultural and geo-political contexts. Scholarly attention might focus on advisory processes that inform feminist policies, such as measures to address gender-regressive impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research is also needed to understand the impacts of feminist policies on the lived experiences of diverse women entrepreneurs. Limitations: The study design did not incorporate viewpoints of policymakers or capture bureaucratic boundary patrolling practices that stymie feminist policies. Thematic analysis was limited to three feminist recovery plans from two countries.

Recommendations to operationalize feminist entrepreneurship policies in the context of pandemic recovery are described.

Ten parameters of feminist entrepreneurship policy are explored. The conceptual study also advances a framework of feminist entrepreneurship policy and considers boundary conditions for when and how the parameters are applicable.

This paper aims to enhance understanding of how sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) contributes to sustainable development in the tourism sector. To do so, specific factors that act as enablers or inhibitors of SE are identified according to a co-evolutionary lens.

A co-evolutionary explanation of the firm? Environment relationship is adopted to undertake a qualitative empirical study of the Castelli Romani tourism destination (Italy), via 23 semi-structured interviews according to a narrative approach.

The paper demonstrates that entrepreneurs play a crucial role in sustainable development but cannot act in isolation. In fact, according to the co-evolutionary approach, they influence and are influenced by 20 factors. Accordingly, SE can be conceptualised as resulting from effective co-evolutionary interactions between micro (i.e. entrepreneurs and their firm), meso (i.e. the destination where tourism firms are based) and macro (i.e. the wider socio-economic and natural system) levels.

Several actions are suggested to entrepreneurs and policymakers to help achieve specific sustainable development goals. These actions focus on: (1) training courses, (2) investments in technologies, (3) creation of innovative business models, (4) exploitation of cultural and natural resources, (5) community involvement and (6) multi-level partnerships.

This is the first study that adopts a co-evolutionary lens to investigate the influencing factors of SE in tourism, shedding light on the effects of their dynamic interdependence. Thus, it provides a more nuanced SE conceptualisation that takes a holistic and dynamic view of sustainability.

Failure plays a pivotal role in entrepreneurial learning. Knowledge of the learning process that enables an entrepreneur to re-emerge stronger after a failure, though considerable, is fragmented. This paper systematically collects relevant literature, assigns it to the stages of the experiential learning process (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation; Kolb, 1984), evaluates the research coverage of each stage and identifies promising avenues for future research.

This systematic literature review follows the guidelines articulated by Short (2009) and Tranfield et al. (2003), using Web of Science and EBSCO as primary data sources. Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory provides a basis for organizing the identified material into a framework of entrepreneurial learning from failure.

The literature provides insights on all stages of the process of entrepreneurial learning from failure. Particularly well elaborated are the nature of failure and its triggering effect for reflection, the factors influencing reflection, the contents of the resulting learning and their application in entrepreneurial re-emergence. Other topics remain under-researched, including alternative modes of recovery, the impact of personal attributes upon reflection, the cognitive processes underlying reflection, the transformation of failure-based observations into logically sound concepts and the application of this learning in non-entrepreneurial contexts.

This review provides the most complete overview of research into the process of entrepreneurial learning from failure. The systematic, theory-based mapping of this literature takes stock of current knowledge and proposes areas for future research.

The goal of this article is to provide an overview of healthcare entrepreneurship, both in terms of its current trends and future directions.

The article engages in a systematic review of extant research on healthcare entrepreneurship using the scientific procedures and rationales for systematic literature reviews (SPAR-4-SLR) as the review protocol and bibliometrics or scientometrics analysis as the review method.

Healthcare entrepreneurship research has fared reasonably well in terms of publication productivity and impact, with diverse contributions coming from authors, institutions and countries, as well as a range of monetary and non-monetary support from funders and journals. The (eight) major themes of healthcare entrepreneurship research revolve around innovation and leadership, disruption and technology, entrepreneurship models, education and empowerment, systems and services, orientations and opportunities, choices and freedom and policy and impact.

The article establishes healthcare entrepreneurship as a promising field of academic research and professional practice that leverages the power of entrepreneurship to advance the state of healthcare.

The article offers a seminal state of the art of healthcare entrepreneurship research.