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The purpose of this article is to explore how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in entrepreneurship.

It is based on an inductive longitudinal case study of a garden in a rural community in northern Sweden. The methodology includes an ethnography of the garden, spanning the course of 16 years, and a careful investigation of the entrepreneurial processes contained within it.

This article identifies and describes different practices to explain how agency is distributed between human actors and nonhuman elements in the garden's context. Three different practices were identified and discussed, namely “calling”, “resisting”, and “provoking”.

Agency/structure constitutes a longstanding conundrum in entrepreneurship and context. This study contributes to the on-going debate on context in entrepreneurship, and introduces a posthumanist perspective—particularly that of distributed agency—to theorising in entrepreneurship. Rather than focussing on a human (hero)-driven change process, induced through the exploitation of material objects, this novel perspective views entrepreneurship as both a human and a nonhuman venture, occurring through interactions located in particular places and times. Coming from the agency/structure dichotomy, this article reaches out for elements traditionally established on the structure side, distributing them to the agency side of the dichotomy. As such, it contributes to an understanding of the agency of nonhuman elements, and how they direct entrepreneurship in context. This theoretical development prepares entrepreneurship theories to be better able to engage with nonhuman elements and provides example solutions for the ongoing climate crisis.

This paper aims to describe an innovative approach of integrating sustainability into the structures and processes of a business school without creating resistance.

A sustainable entrepreneurship competition was embedded as an independent programme in an already existing business plan competition at the School of Business FHNW. The paper shows, which structural elements of the competition had to be adapted to the needs of sustainable entrepreneurs.

The paper outlines aspects that need to be considered and steps that need to be taken to run a sustainable entrepreneurship competition supporting as many high-quality projects as possible. It describes the importance of developing an independent instrument that meets the specific needs of sustainable entrepreneurs in project planning. The sustainable innovation plan is explained.

The student projects are developed at the School of Business FHNW as part of the entrepreneurship competition, which has been successfully carried out twice. They have numerous measurable positive social and ecological effects, which are described by the students in their sustainable innovation plans and are subsequently reflected in the realization of the projects.

Using the example of the Swiss Student Sustainability Challenge, the paper demonstrates under which conditions a sustainability project can be successfully integrated into the existing structures of an institution of higher education and develop into a beacon project of the university. Other universities can make use of these findings to launch comparable projects at their institutions.

This study focuses on the role of individuals in the innovation management process, by concentrating on leaders and associated behaviors. Specifically, Entrepreneurial Leadership (EL) represent one of the most important fields of innovation management that has become increasingly multifaceted and interdisciplinary with its evolution. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine a newly emerging research trend with a new lens that is “neuroscience”.

This paper finds an evidence-based roadmap by reviewing the literature with a quantitative Bibliometric Analysis (BA) employing Co-Citation (Co-C) and bibliographic coupling analysis (BcA) to find linkages between the leadership and entrepreneurship literature and the neuroscience literature.

This study identifies five promising groups of research areas such as the organizational approach, the biological approach, the cognitive approach, the emotional approach and it identify five future research topics such as dynamic skills in innovation exploitation process, the human aspect of leadership, the building process of leadership, the biological perspective of leadership and the application of neuroscience in the ecosystem. Moreover, we find an evidence-based roadmap for stimulating focused EL within the broad topic of innovation management research, to move the field forward.

Although the past few years have observed the necessity of review studies on the subsets of biological factors, no reviews have sought to bring those different subsets together into a broader biological perspective. This study provides important indications on the interdisciplinary developments between the neuroscience aspects and EL, as a new emerging paradigm within the broad field of innovation management.

This study aims to shed light on the phenomenon of food waste generation by the food and beverage sector of hotels of Mauritius as well as examine the current status of food waste management.

This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.

Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.

The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.

This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.

This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.

This study investigates a mediational model between legitimated elements, financial resource mobilisation and subsequent early firm growth among New Technology-Based Firms (NTBFs) using conformity and control perspectives of legitimacy.

To test the hypotheses, a longitudinal database of 303 NTBFs from Sweden, Finland and France is used. The ordinary least square regression analysis method is applied, and the proposed mediation relationships are studied by employing the four-step approach developed by Baron and Kenny (1986).

This study finds that based on the conformity principle, two out of three legitimated elements (business plan and incubator relationship, but not start-up experience) have an impact on financial resource mobilisation, which in turn, is associated with early growth in NTBFs based on the control principle. Thus, financial resource mobilisation positively mediates the relationships among the two legitimated elements and early growth in NTBFs.

This study has several limitations, which also generate promising pathways for future research. Future research should study the relationship between the three legitimacy elements and financial resource mobilisation and early growth across a wider range of firms and settings. The questionnaire was also based on a single point in time and could not capture the evolving nature of the legitimacy elements and fundraising. Hence, future research can examine the multidimensionality of these processes; longitudinal qualitative studies can be a complement, allowing for a better understanding of the impact of legitimacy on NTBFs.

The findings offer implications for managers of NTBFs because developing legitimacy is critical to NTBFs early growth and development. The findings indicate that NTBFs' founders must systematically develop business plans and that incubators help enhance legitimacy through a signalling.

It is believed that the study meaningfully contributes to the collective understanding of the role of legitimacy in driving the development of NTBFs. Given the importance of NTBFs in our economies, coupled with the lack of attention given to the role of mobilisation of external resources in explaining NTBF early growth, it is believed that the study is both timely and important.

The findings meaningfully contribute to the collective understanding of NTBF growth. While there are studies that have examined the antecedents of growth and finance separately, this study proposes a novel mediational model that integrates both and tests it empirically.

Contemporary supply chain relationships inherently rely on delegation of work between organizations and, thus, are subject to agency problems for which a wide range of governance mechanisms exist. This review of agency theory (AT), across four distinct fields, explains the connection between governance mechanisms and supply chain relationship types.

The study uses a systematic literature review (SLR) of articles using AT in a supply chain context from the operations and supply chain management, general management, marketing, and economics fields.

The authors categorize the governance mechanisms identified to create a typology of agency relationships in supply chains.

The developed typology provides parsimonious theory on different forms of supply chain agency relationships and takes a step towards a “supply chain-oriented agency theory” explaining and predicting relationship types and governance in supply chains. Furthermore, a future research agenda calls for more accurate measuring of agency costs, to examine residual gains alongside residual losses, to take a dual-sided perspective of agency relations and to adopt AT to examine more complex supply networks.

The review provides a menu of governance mechanisms and describes situations under which these mechanisms could be deployed to guide managers when developing their supply chain relationships.

The first review to combine and elaborate views from four major disciplines using AT as a lens to supply chain relationships. Expanding the traditional set of governance mechanisms provides academics and practitioners with a bigger “menu” of options to consider.

This paper focuses on the motivation of females to start businesses in developed and emerging economies. Although the issues related to the motivation of entrepreneurs have been widely studied, there are a few studies focusing on the differences in women’s entrepreneurial motivation in countries with different levels of market economy development. Furthermore, existing studies on female founders mainly adapt the concepts that have often been developed in male-dominated paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to explore in depth motivations of female entrepreneurs in different contexts and discover the dissimilarities in women’s entrepreneurial motivations in countries with different levels of economic development.

The qualitative research approach is applied in this study to explore the social-driven and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs. The authors have employed purposeful sampling to select cases. The authors investigated the motivations of 45 female entrepreneurs in Norway (12), Russia (21) and Ukraine (12). Semi-structured interviews were used to collect primary data. The authors have also triangulated the data collected from interviews with the data available on the internet, company reports and newspaper publications.

The findings indicate that women often pursuit business opportunities to satisfy social needs, rather than focusing on traditional business outcomes such as growth or profit. However, different contexts – the emerging economies context of Russia and Ukraine and the developed one of Norway – seem to influence the motivation to establish new ventures differently. The study found a stronger desire to contribute to a society’s needs among female founders in Norway compared to their counterparts in Russia and Ukraine. This indicates that cultural and social context in developed countries, such as in Norway, probably provides more possibilities for female entrepreneurs for self-realisation elsewhere leaving more room for focusing on societal issues in business in comparison with emerging countries contexts.

A novel conceptual contribution is the exploration of links between the social-driven and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs in emerging and developed economises. The study also adds to debates relating to context embeddedness of smaller firms.

In a world where innovation became a “buzzword” and everyone within companies is required to foster innovation, the engagement of people toward innovation is fundamental to prompt individual motivation and actions to make innovation happen. However, despite the relevance of the relationship between engagement and innovation, the literature on the topic appears still fragmented. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the topic through a systematic literature review.

A final sample of 108 papers has been selected and analyzed through co-citation and text mining analyses. The former enabled the analysis of the structure of the theoretical foundation of the filed, while the latter facilitated a systematic and unbiased content-driven review of the literature.

The results of the analysis indicated two main areas of interest describing the relationship between engagement and innovation. On the one hand, there is the focus on “engagement as an attitude,” intended as the capacity of individuals to generate and realize innovation. On the other hand, there is a stream of literature focused on “engagement as involvement,” which refers to co-innovation paradigms, involving both internal and external stakeholders.

From an academic perspective, this paper highlights the relevance of the “human-side” of innovation, proposing avenues for future research that dig into the relationship between people's engagement and innovation dynamics. Moreover, it shows how the recent developments in the innovation management literature are coherent with this emerging relevance of the human perspective in innovation.

From a practitioner’s perspective, this paper helps managers by highlighting the two different approaches that they can have in terms of engagement. The study aims to help them in identifying the kind of engagement they are looking for in their employees and other innovation stakeholder having the support to find relevant studies in that direction.

The study unveils how the evolution of both areas over the years is strictly related to the megatrends of innovation fields, which are the main areas of knowledge not covered yet. Therefore, a research agenda is proposed.

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.