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The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the selection criteria used in preincubation programs. Particular focus has been placed on examining the exclusive and inclusive nature of these criteria, and how they relate to both egalitarian and utilitarian considerations.

The study used two data sources: archival available online data and semi-structured interviews. Forty-nine preincubation programs were examined, with 19 representatives interviewed. The data was analyzed using content analysis to understand the access and selection criteria applied at the preincubation stage.

The goals of preincubation programs vary, including developing students’ competencies, creating new companies or achieving the goals of the corporation that sponsored the program. preincubation programs use three levels of selection criteria, including entry criteria, the potential of the submitted idea and team and the personal characteristics and competencies of the applicants. The entry criteria varied across programs, with some programs being open only to university employees and students, while others were open to the public. The study found that the majority of preincubation programs used a combination of both egalitarian and utilitarian motivations in their selection criteria.

The criteria used to evaluate applications flowing into preincubation should be strongly related to the goals that preincubation is supposed to achieve. It is essential to consider that, contrary to previous knowledge, this process is not only aimed at supporting the creation of new businesses.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that analyzes the approach to selection criteria in preincubation programs with such diverse goals and in different countries as well as expanding the understanding of the criteria used at different stages of the incubation process and relating to the inclusiveness in entrepreneurship.

This study aims to examine Big Data and the management of libraries in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its implications for policymakers in Nigeria.

A qualitative methodology was used, involving the administration of open-ended questionnaires to librarians from six selected federal universities located in Southwest Nigeria.

The findings of this research highlight that a significant proportion of librarians are well-acquainted with the relevance of big data and its potential to positively revolutionize library services. Librarians generally express favorable opinions concerning the relevance of big data, acknowledging its capacity to enhance decision-making, optimize services and deliver personalized user experiences.

This study exclusively focuses on the Nigerian context, overlooking insights from other African countries. As a result, it may not be possible to generalize the study’s findings to the broader African library community.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is unique because the paper reported that librarians generally express favorable opinions concerning the relevance of big data, acknowledging its capacity to enhance decision-making, optimize services and deliver personalized user experiences.

The aim of this study is to systematise the entrepreneurial coaching (EC) literature by understanding how the phenomenon has been investigated along four dimensions inspired by Gartner’s (1985) conceptualisation of entrepreneurship: entrepreneurial process, context, target and outcomes. In so doing, this study will provide a frame of its multifunctional role and identify relevant gaps and suggestions for future research.

We conducted a systematic literature review to collect existing works on EC. We analysed 85 selected papers with a qualitative content analysis that allowed us to highlight relevant research themes for the entrepreneurial process, context, outcomes and target.

Our results demonstrate that EC has a multifunctional role in entrepreneurship that can be summarised in five different typologies, depending on the stage of the entrepreneurial process in which it is applied, the context, the target and the outcomes.

As one of the first attempts to systematise studies on EC, this work extends previous conceptualisation of EC by detailing different typologies of this intervention, thereby contributing to reduced fragmentation and conceptual ambiguity.

This study aims to validate a model to assess the level of lean maturity of Brazilian hospitals based on the adaptation of the SAE J4000/2021 standard.

The methodology was divided: (1) adaptation of the standard to the health context, (2) application of the questionnaire through a survey, and (3) comparison of the results of the level of maturity in the standard and by the clustering technique, using Minitab.

The research presents two contributions: (1) validation of a model to assess the level of lean maturity based on the SAE J4000/2021; (2) insights into the level of maturity of Brazilian hospitals. It was observed that only 10% of the sample was classified at maturity level 3 and 75% at level 2. Private and large hospitals showed greater maturity compared to the others.

This includes the limited number of hospitals that participated in the survey, given the difficulty of adherence to due constraints of time and staffing from hospitals, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article presents a lean maturity assessment proposal, adapting a consolidated standard in the automobile industry to the health context. Insights on the lean maturity of Brazilian hospitals can contribute to the development of policies to encourage the implementation of the lean philosophy directed to each specific environment.

This study serves as a guide for public agents interested in monitoring the quality of hospital indicators through the SAE J4000/2021 standard. From this lean maturity analysis, hospital managers can understand their opportunities for improvement in both human and organizational aspects. This favors the improvement of service delivery to society that depends on health services.

Due to the lack of research that validates lean maturity level assessment models in Brazilian hospitals, this study can be considered a pioneer in this Brazilian research by validating the SAE J4000/2021 standard in its updated version in the health context.

The ability of a business to outperform its rivals is known as its competitive edge, and it presents special difficulties in the context of the “digital revolution,” or the fourth industrial revolution. To obtain a competitive edge in the startup operations 4.0 era, this study aims to examine the organizational, technological and competence-related challenges presented by Industry 4.0. It does this by concentrating on the tools, competencies, methods, approaches, tools and strategies that are crucial. Using the Total Interpretive Structural Modeling (TISM) technique, the goal is to find, analyze and classify enablers for startup operations 4.0.

A closed-ended questionnaire and planned interviews were used in the data collection process. In startup operations 4.0, the cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification method is used to rank and categorize competitive advantage factors, whereas the TISM technique is used to analyze how components interact.

The study highlights the critical significance of the “Internet of Things (IoT),” “information technologies,” “technological platforms,” “employee empowerment,” “augmented reality (AR)” and “operational technologies” in its identification of 12 enablers for startup operations 4.0.

The main focus of the study is on the variables that affect startup operations 4.0’s competitive advantage.

Academics and important stakeholders can better understand the factors influencing competitive advantage in startup operations 4.0 with the help of this research.

Large businesses have been profoundly impacted by Industry 4.0 principles; however, startup operations 4.0’s competitive advantage has not received as much attention. This paper offers a fresh take on the concept of competitive advantage in startup operations 4.0 research.

The lean startup approach (LSA) is extensively utilized by early-stage entrepreneurs, with “pivot” serving as a key pillar. However, there is a research gap concerning the boundary conditions impacting LSA and pivot decisions, especially when addressing societal challenges, as in the context of transformational entrepreneurship. In this regard, the healthcare sector, further compounded by a lack of research on startups and scale-ups, presents an embraced opportunity to provide multiple contributions for both theory and practice.

The present investigation employs a grounded approach to explore the experiences of the co-founders of a fast-growing Italian e-health startup. A narrative strategy was employed to organize conditions and evolving strategic action/interactions into three different pivoting phases of the startup – before the pivot, its enactment and aftermath – with primary and secondary data collected over a period of one year.

Pivoting in digital healthcare unfolded as a liminal experience marked by factors such as high regulation, multiple stakeholders, technological and symbolic ambivalence, resource-intensive demands and institutional actors acting as pathway pioneers, leading to an information overload and unforeseeable uncertainty to manage. These factors challenge entrepreneurs' ability to attain optimal distinctiveness, presenting the paradoxical need for vertical flexibility for scaling up.

By uniquely illuminating the sector’s constraints on entrepreneurial phenomena, this study provides a valuable guide for entrepreneurs and institutional actors in addressing societal challenges.

This study introduces a process model of transformational information crafting when pivoting, highlighting the role of entrepreneurs' transformational stance and platform-mediated solutions as engines behind strategies involving information breaking and transition, preceding knowledge-driven integration strategies.

Many individuals start a new firm each year, mainly intending to become independent or improve their financial situation. For most of them, the first years of operations mean a substantial investment of time, effort and money with highly insecure outcomes. This study aims to explore how entrepreneurs running new firms perform financially compared with the established ones and how this situation influences their well-being.

A questionnaire survey was completed in 2021 and 2022 by a representative sample of N = 1136 solo self-employed and microentrepreneurs in the Czech Republic, with dependent self-employed excluded. This study used multiple regressions for data analysis.

Early-stage entrepreneurs are less satisfied with their financial situation, have lower disposable income and report more significant financial problems than their established counterparts. The situation is even worse for the subsample of startups. However, this study also finds they do not have lower well-being than established entrepreneurs. While a worse financial situation is generally negatively related to well-being, being a startup founder moderates this link. Startup founders can maintain a good level of well-being even in financial struggles.

The results suggest that policies should focus on reducing the costs related to start-up activities. Further, policy support should not be restricted to new technological firms. Startups from all fields should be eligible to receive support, provided that they meet the milestones of their development. For entrepreneurship education, this study‘s results support action-oriented approaches that help build entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy while making them aware of cognitive biases common in entrepreneurship. This study also underscores that effectuation or lean startup approaches help entrepreneurs develop their startups efficiently and not deprive themselves of resources because of their unjustified overconfidence.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the financial situation and well-being of founders of new firms and, specifically, startups. The personal financial situation of startup founders has been a largely underexplored issue. Compared with other entrepreneurs, this study finds that startup founders are, as individuals, in the worst financial situation. Their well-being remains, however, on a comparable level with that of other entrepreneurs.

Research done to date has produced a wide range of perspectives that center on the junction between the specific function and responsibility of the entrepreneur when applying ethical dimensions to the field of entrepreneurship. By combining a bibliometric analysis with the literature review, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of entrepreneurship ethics and its contribution to sustainable development goals, along with future research directions on the topic of entrepreneurship and ethics.

The research looked for literature based on entrepreneurship ethics from the Dimension database. The authors accumulated 2,279 articles for the period of 2002–2022 for analysis. The authors used bibliometric analysis for analyzing the topic with the use of VosViewer and Excel.

By combining a bibliometric analysis with a literature review, this study aimed to provide an overview of the ethics and entrepreneurship and contribution to sustainable development goals. The most influential author and journal are Vanessa Ratten and the Journal of Business Ethics, respectively. The top sustainable development goals (SDGs) being contributed by entrepreneurship ethics are SDG4, SDG8, SDG16, SDG11 and SDG3. By contrasting these two interpretations, the authors have demonstrated that the entrepreneurship environment involves various ethical issues connected to personal, organizational and societal sectors.

The current study may serve as a general guideline for future investigation into this topic.

Regarding the practical ramifications, the findings can help entrepreneurs who are preparing to launch a business or are already doing so. The findings provide a comprehensive framework of success variables that must be considered to improve the venture’s performance.

This study’s originality is from presenting a structured and in-depth literature review that describes the current state of entrepreneurship ethics and its contribution to sustainable development goals. A complete analysis of the data gathered on entrepreneurship ethics is offered to establish that it is sustainable.

The aim of this study reported in this paper was to explore the application of operational excellence methodologies in a global context.

A qualitative interview approach was used to understand the current state, benefits, challenges, success factors, tools and techniques of operational excellence methodology implementation with relevance to logistics companies worldwide. About 16 interviews were undertaken with practitioners working in leading companies and with leading academics in Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America and Australia.

The findings show that operational excellence methodologies including Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma and Agile can apply in logistics firms to improve operations and productivity and save costs. Top management support and involvement play an important role in the success of operational excellence projects in the logistics service.

The findings will be of interest to top and middle managers and logistics practitioners, with a dual aim of improving logistics performance and saving costs.

The present study has been one of the first global study attempts to explore the implementation of operational excellence methodologies in the logistics sectors.

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between Lean manufacturing and Industry 4.0 for small and medium size of enterprise in Japan and Brazil.

The authors conducted a quantitative survey (20 companies in Japan and 30 companies in Brazil) combined with a qualitative interview (2 companies in Japan and 15 companies in Brazil).

According to the quantitative study, 90% of them practice Lean manufacturing and 40% of them practice Industry 4.0. In the qualitative study in Brazil, four managers responded that the Lean manufacturing is a prerequisite for Industry 4.0 since any production process with waste cannot be productive, even with sophisticated digitalization technology.

The authors explored further the relationship between “defensive Digital Transformation (DX),” which is based mainly on Lean manufacturing, and “offensive DX,” which relates to customer value creation through Industry 4.0. This study clarifies the relationship and plays as a roadmap to develop better the manufacturing from current status to the vision of Industry 4.0.