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The aim of this article is to contribute to the field of social businesses, particularly considering the dimension of social innovation.

The authors adopted a qualitative approach, whose purpose is to gather in-depth insights into a problem to understand its contextual elements and interrelations. The authors used an exploratory descriptive design and a multiple case study, which allows the identification of similarities and differences in the research subjects. They developed a scale that enables the classification of the operation logic of the social businesses analyzed.

It became evident that social businesses present a few differences in their modus operandi: those based on a social logic are more concerned with the generation of socio-environmental value, however with small-scale innovation; in contrast, social business guided by a market logic do not intend to generate socio-environmental value in different dimensions and are more concerned with the wider range of their innovations.

This research analyzed social businesses from a founder and manager perspective and did not comprise all stakeholders. The purpose of this study was not to measure the effective impact generated by innovation, but to understand its potential to generate socio-environmental value.

The generation of socio-environmental value and the strategies to expand practices of social innovation are associated with the operation logic of social business.

The created scale allowed the classification of social businesses in terms of operation logic (greater emphasis on market or social aspects) and proposes a few dimensions to evaluate a socio-environmental innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that the female-owned university spin-off organizations (USOs) have a similar resource endowment and, as a consequence, growth rates similar to the male-owned USOs.

A unique and original longitudinal data set, which is an unbalanced panel, consisting of 120 Spanish USOs over the period 2001-2010 has been constructed. The methodology includes the analysis of mean differences (t-test) and dynamic panel data models.

The results confirmed that there are no gender differences in either the firms’ initial resource endowment or in the preference for industries. There is no gender effect on the USOs’ growth, but the initial endowment resources matter. Thus the financial, human and technological resources have a positive effect on the USOs’ growth. This evidence suggests that the USOs’ context may mitigate the initial resource endowment of the female-owned firms and their preferences for traditional industries, showing similar rates of growth than male-owned USOs.

Owners’ gender has been used as a proxy for founders’ gender. Also, only USOs included in the SABI database have been considered as part of the sample; the significant number of USOs that did not reveal information about their owners have been discarded.

It is important to continue supporting academic entrepreneurship, as in the university context, firm growth is not affected by gender differences. However, given that the percentage of female owners in university entrepreneurship is still lower compared to entrepreneurship in general, the universities’ entrepreneur programmes targeting women must adopt a gendered perspective.

Literature on USOs has traditionally analyzed the firm-specific characteristics that impact their growth without considering the influence of the owners’ gender. In this paper, an attempt to fill this gap has been made using a sample of 120 Spanish USOs and by applying the dynamic panel data methodology. In particular, it has been argued that the university context from which USOs emerge allows female-owned USOs to have a similar resource endowment and, as a consequence, a similar growth when compared to male-owned USOs.

Women in entrepreneurship can have a significant impact on economic and social development globally and particularly in developing countries. But the challenges entrepreneurial women face are unique and multiple, pressing the need for research and policies to maximize impact. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the challenges women start-up founders face to secure funding in the technology industry. The tech industry was selected because it is a non-traditional industry for women with high potential for role models to bridge an existing gap in information on women start-up founders to secure capital financing to attain business sustainability. It covers venture capital investors’ role, Latin American cultural reasons, and gender.

This study is based on an inductive, qualitative approach and in-depth interviews with 20 women entrepreneurs and start-up founders from Latin American countries who received support from the Chilean Government sponsored accelerator “Start-Up Chile.”

The analysis uncovered ten aspects that impact entrepreneurial women founders’ access to capital in three categories: capital needs, networks, and individual characteristics.

This study identifies factors that affect women entrepreneurs in raising capital and in facing the following challenges: first, working in a non-traditional field for women as it is the technology industry, and second assuming a leadership role as start-up founders. The results offer recommendation with potential to drive public policies in Latin America, which may be scalable to other developing and also to developed countries where market systems prevail. The findings show that women entrepreneurs, but also men, seeking start-up financing and alternatives are a viable source of employment and economic sustainability to mitigate the effects of increasing levels of unemployment worldwide.

Entrepreneurial identity involves identifying and exploiting opportunities to create value and wealth. Entrepreneurship contributes mainly to a firm’s efforts be exploited in a marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the entrepreneurial social identities identified by Fauchart and Gruber (2011) and three primary stakeholders: investors, customers and employees.

Data were collected through online questionnaires from entrepreneurs who had created their own new venture in Spain. The results were analysed using partial least squares technique (PLS-SEM) (Fornell and Cha, 1994) with Smart PLS 3.0 (Ringle et al., 2015).

The results show that the identities defined as Darwinian and Communitarian have a positive effect on profits and growth in sales, which serve to create value for investors and customers. The effect is not significant, however, when these identities are connected to job creation to create value for employees. Further, the multi-group analysis performed shows that this relationship differs significantly based on gender.

The main limitation is that this research does not include relevant stakeholders like sponsors or project managers. The next step is to expand this research to this kind of stakeholders.

The research assists gender entrepreneurial social identity and business performance under the impact on primary stakeholders.

This research has the potential to analyse the entrepreneurial social identities for their contribution to create value and wealth.

The authors’ main contributions are to have based the study on the relationship between entrepreneurial social identity and business performance and their impact on primary stakeholders and to have analysed the differences on gender entrepreneurial social identity and business performance and their impact on primary stakeholders.

In a globalized economic system, the role of agrifood production is to ensure at the same time both the population's livelihood and environmental resource conservation. The present study aims at expanding the debate on the potentials of the fair-trade in terms of environmental sustainability.

The research presents a methodology divided into three phases: (1) the identification of the water footprint values associated with the production of bananas, cocoa and coffee imported from developing countries to Italy; (2) the calculation of the virtual water volumes used to produce the crops imported from developing countries to Italy through fair-trade; (3) the analysis of the economic water productivity, obtained by the fair-trade premium, for bananas, cocoa and coffee.

The results of this study identified and measured the amount of virtual water flows and water savings or losses deriving from the fair-trade of bananas, cocoa and coffee. The average virtual water flow related to the fair-trade imports in Italy amounts to 7.27 million m³ for bananas, 22,275 m³ for cocoa and 14,334 m³ for coffee. The research findings also highlight that fair-trade and the related premium ensures at the same time the achievement of social and institutional purposes but also the remuneration of virtual water used within the life cycle of the imported crops.

Previous scientific literature showed that fair-trade premium has commonly been used to finance environmental protection. No study has evaluated the environmental impacts associated with fair-trade, nor the monetary value associated with the natural resources exploited to produce crops to be exported. This empirical paper fills a literature gap in terms of identification, measurement and evaluation of virtual water flows along the supply chain processes of some fair-traded crops, also providing, through the economic water productivity approach, a useful tool for decision-makers.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following question: In times of permanent connectivity, what forms of freedom need to be considered to prevent permanent availability as an unintended consequence? By using the Hegelian perspective on freedom, the paper categorizes three forms of freedom to transfer them to a common, contemporary understanding of freedom relating it to freedom through human-to-human digital communication. The aim is to show that freedom is not only about independence and realizing choices but also about embedding and committing oneself.

This mainly conceptual paper derives implications based on the Hegelian theory. This is supplemented by an interdisciplinary approach, whereby categories of other philosophers, ethicists, economists and sociologists are applied. The analysis of the contemporary perspective on freedom is enriched by referencing empirical studies.

Digital communication offers new freedom such as working with fewer restrictions from time and space, especially for knowledge workers. It is theoretically possible to work 24 h per day from anywhere (independence), as well as to decide on the final location and timing of one’s work (realizing choices). When solely focusing on these – seemingly advantageous – forms of freedom in times of permanent connectivity, unintended consequences such as the expectation of permanent availability develop. The key message of the paper is that considering one’s temporal and social dependencies (embeddedness) is an indispensable part of actual freedom to avoid unintended consequences.

Organizations need to invest in moral discernment to understand unintended consequences, as well as to cope with them.

Applying the Hegelian theory on freedom based on digital communication to better understand social dynamics of digital communication is a largely unexplored avenue in the existing scientific literature. The decision to undertake this venture resulted from the identified necessity of understanding freedom better. It is often not clear what is meant by freedom through digital communication. Although freedom is a complex construct, it is often reduced to independence/having a choice and realizing choices. When solely focusing on independence and realizing choices, unintended consequences such as permanent availability often go unnoticed. It is exactly because of these issues that this paper endeavors to examine the (deep) meaning of the powerful, yet complex, term of freedom.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the main factors that may affect Italian consumers’ willingness to eat insects. Italy is a fairly special case among Western countries: in many Italian regions, there is old traditional food with insects.

Data come from a sample of 456 consumers living in four Italian regions. The empirical investigation involves several steps: modification of class distributions to obtain a balanced sample; model estimation using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator; model evaluation using out-of-sample classification performance measures; and estimation of the “effect” of each explanatory variable via average predictive comparisons. The uncertainty associated with the whole procedure is evaluated using the bootstrap.

The interviewed consumers are generally unwilling to eat insect-based food. However, factors such as previous experience, taste expectations and attitude towards both new food experiences and sustainable food play an important role in shaping individual inclination towards eating insects.

The sample analysed in this study is not representative of the whole national population, as it happens in most papers dealing with entomophagy.

The paper revisits the issue using a relatively large sample and sophisticated statistical methods. The likely average effect of each explanatory variable is estimated and discussed in detail. The results provide interesting insights on how to approach a hypothetical Italian consumer in view of the possible development of a new market for edible insects.

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