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Much of strategy has been about defense, building the largest castle with the thickest walls to defend position, and tying down the customer with switching costs, standards, and transaction costs. The digital age changed that, making ineffective the usual competitive advantages of size and scope, infrastructure, and the former capabilities. The metaphor has moved from walls to windows: for transparency, fresh air, connection, and some protection from the harsher elements. A proactive windows strategy assembles scale and scope collaboratively, creates relationships that make switching unattractive, develops intangible resources all along the value chain, and builds co‐specialized capabilities. Illustrative examples come from three companies that have thrived in the digital age: eBay (a new company and industry), Lending Tree (new in an old industry), and Charles Schwab (old in an old industry).

A great deal of policy thinking in the last ten to 15 years has been driven by the insights gained from the so‐called “new growth theory”. The theory emphasizes that investments in knowledge and human capital generate economic growth through spillover of knowledge, and the policy implication is that investments in knowledge and human capital are the best way to stimulate growth. However, there is a couple of missing links in the “spillover argument” in that the theory seems to disregard the role of the entrepreneur. The paper aims to answer the question: Why haven't entrepreneurship researchers become a strong voice regarding the understanding of the development of the knowledge economy?

The author argues that a dynamic and innovative research field is characterized by a balance between the pursuit of new issues and knowledge in research, for example, by being sensitive for changes in society, and the development of existing knowledge, by integrating and validating the knowledge base already existing within the field.

The paper shows that one important reason for the lack of visibility of entrepreneurship research can be found in an internal scientific development of the research field – entrepreneurship research has become more and more theory‐driven and shows less sensitivity and openness for changes in society.

The article gives a critical reflection on the development of entrepreneurship as a research field. In this sense the article provides an increased understanding of the knowledge that is within the field, and gives also suggestions for the future development of the research field.

This paper aims to investigate the evolution, roots and influence of the rural entrepreneurship literature.

Using a bibliometric exercise, the analysis starts with investigation of studies on entrepreneurship and gathering all (772) articles on rural entrepreneurship (from 1981 to 2020) found in both Scopus and Web of Science up to 15 August 2020. Citation analysis of the references/citations of 755 articles are listed in the abstract database, generating a citation database involving 46,432 references/citations. This paper considers 635 (out of the 772) articles on rural entrepreneurship (i.e. articles cited in one or more studies), generating a database of 10,767 studies influenced by the rural entrepreneurship literature.

This study discovers that the relative importance of rural entrepreneurship within the entrepreneurship literature has increased in the last few years, but rural entrepreneurship remains a European concern; the most frequently addressed topics include growth and development, institutional frameworks and governance and rurality, with theory building being rather understudied. Most of the studies on rural entrepreneurship are empirical, involving mainly qualitative analyses and targeting high income countries; rural entrepreneurship is rooted in the fields of economics and entrepreneurship and is relatively self-referential.

This study provides a comprehensive and updated investigation of evolution of the rural entrepreneurship literature. The assessment of the literature’s scientific roots of rural entrepreneurship had not yet been tackled before. To the best of the author’s knowledge this study can be considered as the first effort for identifying the scientific influence of the rural entrepreneurship literature.

Advanced bibliometric methods have emerged as key tools in mapping the history and trends of a discipline. This paper aims to demonstrate on applying various bibliometric methods to track a journal’s impact and review its knowledge contribution. In doing so, the authors take the case of IIMB Management Review (IMR) journal focused on management discipline, in consideration of its 10 years of publication presence.

Using bibliometric and Scopus metric methods, the authors map and analyze the productivity of IMR Journal and map its knowledge contributions.

The authors identify the IMR journal’s impact, its growth, the most prolific authors/affiliations, key research hotspots, cross-country collaboration and emerging trends over the past decade.

A 10-year longitudinal review helps the target group identify the main themes. It also provides key empirical insights to the journal editorial board and library managers for future planning and growth of the journal.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key values individuals believe in and their interpretation in the context of entrepreneurial behaviour. The study is predicated on the prior work of Krueger (2007) and specifically on the premise that “deep beliefs” underpin sense making, decision making and subsequent entrepreneurial behaviour.

The study utilised an inductive and interpretive research design within a constructivist paradigm. In phase one, Schwartz’s (1992) 54 values inventory was used to discover a core value-set associated with entrepreneurial behaviour. The results were later used as an “aide-memoire” during the second phase of in-depth interviews with 30 self-selected entrepreneurs. Interviews focused primarily on the meaning individuals attributed to those fundamental values they associated with entrepreneurial behaviour. The resulting narrative was subjected to discourse analysis and categorised into relevant themes.

Self-determined human action is based on a specific set of values which the individual uses to make decisions about how to behave in situations that are meaningful to them. Engaging in entrepreneurship is one form of self-determined behaviour that enables the individual to express and satisfy a variety of different fundamental needs. Four specific values are believed to be critical to the motivation of entrepreneurial behaviour, namely, independence, creativity, ambition and daring. The meaning attributed to each of these values is consistent with that attributed to self-determinism, self-efficacy and the identity of participants associated with entrepreneurship.

There are limitations to this research and the extension of the findings to a generalised population comprising individuals who may, or may not, behave entrepreneurially. This is not to say that such individuals hold values substantially different in other roles or areas of their lives outside a purely business context. The values rated by participants in this study had relevance to their view of entrepreneurial behaviour and were confined to a business perspective.The variability in meaning attributed to these values is however likely to produce a common thread focusing on control, creativity and goal-directed behaviour.

The study strongly suggests the presence of a specific value-set associated with entrepreneurial behaviour. The shift in emphasis to independence and being ambitious, at the expense of being creative and daring, represents one explanation for the episodic nature of entrepreneurial behaviour among individuals. The data further reveal differences in entrepreneurial behaviour within urban and rural contexts with the former being more tolerant of entrepreneurial activity because of its inherent cultural diversity

Similarly, all participants have assimilated several different identities for the different social roles they occupy. Within those varying roles there is the possibility that both individual and group values will differ from what is reported here. The purpose of the study was to isolate as far as possible entrepreneurial behaviour and its core values independently from other types of behaviour and values. However, the likelihood does exist that values held by some individuals from other spheres of their lives could take precedence over their entrepreneurial role and thus influence their survey results.

The value of this study lies in exposing the underlying motivations that cause entrepreneurial behaviour. The study also discovered that shifts occur in the belief structure causing individuals to engage in managerial behaviour in preference to entrepreneurial behaviour at critical stages in the business life-cycle. The study further identifies cultural differences in individualistic vs collectivist cultures and the degrees to which entrepreneurial behaviour is accepted within urban vs rural environments.

The purpose of this paper is to review existing literature at the intersection of resilience and entrepreneurship. It identifies six scholarly conversations, each of which draws on distinct notions of resilience and entrepreneurship. Based on those conversations, shortcomings in the existing literature are discussed and avenues for future research are outlined.

A systematic multi-disciplinary review of 144 papers that are categorized into six scholarly conversations to build the foundation for a critical discussion of each line of inquiry.

This paper identifies six conversations or research streams at the intersection of entrepreneurship and resilience: resilience as traits or characteristics of entrepreneurial firms or individuals, resilience as a trigger for entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurial behavior as enhancing organizational resilience, entrepreneurial firms fostering macro-level (regions, communities, economies) resilience, resilience in the context of entrepreneurial failure, and resilience as a process of recovery and transformation. The review revealed these publications imprecisely define constructs and use a limited amount of the extant scholarship on both entrepreneurship and resilience. Future research should take a more holistic approach to explore entrepreneurship and resilience from a multi-level and longitudinal perspective, especially in the context of socio-ecological sustainability.

This paper incorporates insights on resilience and entrepreneurship across academic disciplines to show how future contributions could benefit by incorporating research from other fields. In doing so, it provides a starting point for more nuanced discussions around the interrelationships between the different conversations and the role entrepreneurs can play in promoting a positive, long-term trajectory for a socio-ecological system.

Even if in a traditional perspective the discovery and the exploitation of opportunities are associated to the entrepreneur’s capabilities, a relational perspective is required to better analyze the phenomenon of starting up a new venture. The growing attention to interaction with the external environment has been emerging as a precondition of the entrepreneurial processes as it creates the knowledge and the experience necessary to perceive the opportunity. The entrepreneurial opportunities are created through joint acts with others through social relationships. Shifting the attention from social to business relationships, the main aim of this paper is to investigate the discovery and the exploitation of collective entrepreneurial opportunities in starting up new business. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of relational proximity in the entrepreneurial journey considered as an emergent process of transforming potentiality into actuality.

The paper applied a qualitative methodology (Dubois and Araujo, 2004) and a case study approach (Barrat et al., 2011). The case concerns the dyadic spin-off relationship between the innovative start up, ShapeMode (the generated firm), and the Milan FabLab (the generating firm) located in Lombardy Region (Italy).

The emerging of collective entrepreneurial opportunities could be analyzed at two levels: the first one concerns the dyadic spin-off relationship, while the second one is founded on the business relationships that the start-up can activate with the business partners of the generating firm. The collective entrepreneurial opportunities are positive influenced by jointness of the actors and their co-evolution, founded on the shared values and goals.

Although the case study approach allowed the researcher to gain detailed information about the spin-off relationship, this effort does not measure the performance outcomes of the relationships and actions that were taken to improve the competitiveness of the start-up. Future studies would benefit from a large-scale questionnaire given to the members of the start-up and to the actors of its Entrepreneurial Network, so to analyze all of its performance implications for the start-up and the network as a whole. In addition, it could be of interest for future research to investigate the effects of collective entrepreneurial opportunities in order to examine this topic more deeply.

From a managerial point of view, even if the growing number of start-ups has been associated to a temporary phenomenon, the development of new ventures is now consolidated. A new managerial approach is required to promote the birth and the growth of the start-ups. The development of a new venture requires to shift the attention from the collection of financial resources to the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities generated by interconnected business relationships. In this way a relevant attention should be recognized to the new role of organizations that can be considered as facilitators of business relationships, such as the FabLab. This paper sheds light on the relevance of the strategic networking that sustains the generation of collective entrepreneurial opportunities. The networking involves actors that belong to different geographic area and different countries but that are focused on the same business dream related to the exploitation of potentialities of digital fabrication. The policymakers should recognize the role of the FabLab as facilitator of knowledge diffusion concerning digital fabrication.

The entrepreneurial opportunities such as the starting up of a new business and its evolution, are enacted, discovered and exploited through interconnected business relationships. In particular the main entrepreneurial opportunities are generated by the activation of business relationships with new business actors. Focusing on the dyadic spin-off relationship, the exploitation of collective entrepreneurial opportunities depends on the sharing of third actors. The business partners of the generating actor (FabLab) became business partners of the generated actor (start-up). The evolution of the generating firm (FabLab) influenced the birth and the evolution of the generated firms (start-up). The dyadic relationship allows the generated firm to discover entrepreneurial opportunities and to exploit them, accessing to the business partners of the generating firm. The effectiveness of the spin-off relationship sustains the replication of the model of new firm generation, that could benefit from the relationships of the two actors of the dyad. Moreover the strong relationships are founded on relational proximity that is characterized by the sharing of values, vision and business dreams.

The purpose of this paper is to holistically explore value creation approaches in a program of cultural projects to inform the practices of project/program management in both public and private sectors.

The paper brings together the literature on project, program and portfolio value creation to inform a case study conducted with engaged scholarship research methods.

Three themes of value creation are revealed: managing collaboration, coordination and perception. Effectuation and causation are both observed, demonstrating that a combination of logics underpin decision making in projects.

The results are based on a single case in a cultural context. Further research is needed to determine whether the observed value creation themes apply more generally, and to explore more deeply the use of logics associated with entrepreneurship in project decision making.

The study reveals several non-commercial aspects of value creation that may play a role across a range of project environments. Practitioners may be able to recognize a wider range of value creation and to better nurture these previously unacknowledged types of value.

The study provides new insights on value and decision logic through in-depth analysis of value creation in a program of culture projects.

Both project investments and entrepreneurial ventures are considered powerful catalysts of economic prosperity and social progress. But these ventures and investments come with their inherent challenges and risks. Observing this situation, academics have paid close attention to the fields of entrepreneurship and project management (E&PM). Thus, for over 30 years, the two fields have witnessed remarkable developments among management and organization studies. The historical perspective reveals that these two multidisciplinary fields were built in parallel, on very distinct mindsets and cultures. The purpose of this paper is to offer a wider dialogic conversation between two distinct perspectives and related propositions: E&PM should stay separated; and E&PM should converge.

In order to guide the investigation of these propositions, the authors call for Luhmann and a systemic-discursive perspective of both fields discourses. Ultimately, the purpose is to contribute to the debate surrounding the following questions: are E&PM fields so far from each other, and thus, irreconcilable? And, if so, is it so good?

Finally, the authors will suggest that E&PM may stay far from each other as they do not share similar discourses and codes. This may be a good state of affairs, however, as distance generates a fruitful creative tension between them.

While many researchers focus on linking E&PM, arguing that they largely agree as to their underlying goal, the paper aims to offer a wider dialogical conversation between the two distinct perspectives and their related propositions: E&PM should stay separate; and E&PM should converge. In order to do so, this paper calls for a Luhmannian and a systemic-discursive perspective.