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The purpose of this paper is to examine the organization and execution of the planning process of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). The focus is placed on the different stakeholders involved and their role in the decision‐making process.

The research involves content analysis of the available paperwork and interviews with leading personnel of DEFRA.

The organization of the planning process ensures strong involvement of the industry. As the financial resources of DEFRA are limited, parts of the costs of the process are passed on to the industry, which allow it to play a stronger role. By delegating major tasks to other organizations DEFRA lacks control of the execution of its decisions.

The research is limited by the view of the interviewed persons. As it is a pre‐impact study, people could act in a different manner than originally stated if an outbreak should occur.

Through identifying the motivations of participating actors, it was demonstrated that this system is prone to the same failures as already shown in the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis. It is discussed if the role of government planning is really necessary or if the whole task could be done by the industry.

The paper is a pre‐impact study and will contribute to the debate about the system in general.

The purpose of the paper is to put across the concerns about the potential health hazards to consumers of products following various food scandals (i.e. BSE and the foot and mouth epidemics) have resurfaced again in the poultry market with avian influenza. Changes in patterns of consumption inevitably follow such incidences and the behaviours adopted very often follow risk assessment of the situation. The paper aims to examine and explain the drivers of changes of consumption in a unique segment of the market.

Students were chosen in accordance with previous studies of this type as they represent a homogeneous group, well informed and significant in numbers. The work of Slovic was used to construct a questionnaire to assess consumer risk and this was then extended to the area of consumption change according to the strategies identified by Roselius.

Through a correlation of risk based variables with changes in behaviour, a consumption change model is developed which demonstrates that knowledge, assessment of the potential for disaster and experience from past food scandals are the main drivers of change.

The research was performed immediately after the confirmation of the first H5N1 case in the UK and gives insight on how consumer behaviour is influenced by such an event.

New business ideas, especially those which address markets that do not yet exist, face huge difficulties in securing vital resources. Hence, governments support the creation of a protected environment, business incubators, in which these early ventures can develop. Business incubators perform two different processes: servicing the companies they host and fulfilling their main stakeholders' demands. Hence, this paper is critical of whether business incubators in Lithuania have been installed due to real economic demand to help all the promising startups to develop or if they serve primarily political goals. Business incubators are exposed to pressure from shareholders, both public and private, and adopt certain strategies to deal with their expectations. The paper aims to explore how the management of business incubators understand their own position, tasks and challenges and how they see their business incubators performing now and in the future.

This paper adds viewpoints from the sociology‐based institutional theory, adopting a more critical view on how institutions emerge, how they are influenced by their environment and how they shape the environment in which they operate. In‐depth interviews were conducted with the management of the business incubators. The paper included all seven business incubators of Lithuania: five business incubators in Vilnius and two business incubators in Kaunas.

The studied Lithuanian business incubators have a strong focus on property, together with the offering of training and consulting, although at a very superficial level. There are strong arguments in favor of a mimicking process and institutional behavior. What made these property developments so attractive was the available public money, particularly from the European Union. As long as the money keeps flowing, there is a strong incentive to grow. The managers say that their public shareholders provide only weak support after the business incubator was set up. Their private investors, on the other hand, are interested in high rents. In addition, teams operating the business incubators are small, most consisting of not more than three people; a much lower number than the European average of 12.

The empirical results offer interesting insights into the self‐understanding of the management of Lithuanian business incubators, their setup and the environment in which they operate.

This study focuses on ratcheting and budget behavior in nonprofit museums. Specifically, the authors examine how performance compared with the budget affects future revenue budgets, and how this differs from the extant literature focused on for-profit organizations. The study focuses specifically on the relationship between museums and their sources of public funding and how this affects how museums prepare budgets.

Based on four years of data covering 97 state-subsidized Danish museums, the authors analyze budget ratcheting using least absolute deviation (LAD) estimations in the form of median regressions.

The authors find that when actual revenue from admission charges is below the budget, the decrease in the following year's budget is greater than the increase in the following year's budget when actual revenue from admission charges is above the budget (i.e. the authors find asymmetrical ratcheting).

The findings are based on a specific setting (Danish museums), and the results may not be generalizable to other settings.

This study provides insights into the museum sector and other sectors with similar characteristics and contributes to understanding the differences between museums and for-profit organizations when it comes to budgeting. As private-sector management practices are gaining ground in the museum sector, it is important to learn more about budgeting-related issues in this sector.

The asymmetrical ratcheting the authors find is the opposite of ratcheting typically found in for-profit organizations. The authors attribute the results to the incentive conflict between museums and their public funding sources. The authors point to the museums' dependence on public funding as an explanation for the results and, thereby, extend the knowledge on ratcheting to organizations with different characteristics than traditional, for-profit organizations.

Sectoral foresight activities often identify technological opportunities but leave the question open who will pursue them. Entrepreneurial activities have become increasingly important for the introduction and commercialization of new technological solutions. The same is true for Russia’s oil and gas industry, which requires a major technological upscaling to stay competitive. Promising start-ups, however, often face high barriers and fail to commercialize superior technological solutions. The purpose of this study is to show how industry-specific entry barriers can hamper start-up activities.

This paper discusses the experiences of a Russian oilfield service start-up in commercializing a self-developed technology for increasing the productivity of oil wells.

The start-up faced conservatism from corporate decision-makers, declining oil prices and suboptimal protection of intellectual property rights. The company overcame most barriers through moving into other markets outside of Russia, as closing a deal with customers in the USA and Canada went much faster than the extended business cycles of national oil companies.

This paper connects sectoral foresight activities to the real-life experience of a start-up. The findings suggest that entry barriers need to be addressed by the planning process to really pave the way for a greater impact of entrepreneurial activity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate collaboration and coordination practices in the organisation whose members come from two countries that differ dramatically in generalised trust: Poland and the USA.

A qualitative field study conducted in Silicon Valley-based American-Polish start-up joint venture.

There are three mechanisms can facilitate collaboration in organisations that differ in generalised trust: frequent interaction that may form a basis for knowledge-based trust, professional cultures that provide common platform for communication, and presence of intermediaries that possess understanding and ability to communicate of both cultures.

The findings can be applied in the context of offshoring projects in knowledge intensive industries.

Research presented in this paper investigates collaboration of parties from low-trust and high-trust cultures within one business venture.

Using the social constructivist perspective of learning, this study aims to examine the patterns and the key areas of entrepreneurial learning based on a case study of 16 participants who were the incubatees of two technology-based business incubators in China. The key research question is: how do novice entrepreneurs, focusing on technology-based business incubators, learn from a social constructivist perspective?

The researchers applied a qualitative methodology in this study as they wanted to understand better the complexity of the learning process that is hard to achieve quantitatively. The qualitative data was collected through in-depth interviews with the incubatees, who were the managers and owners of their businesses. The interviews with the entrepreneurs were mainly focused on the learning patterns and the factors influencing learning through the use of the critical incident technique.

This will allow incubator managers to better evaluate the extent of effective entrepreneurial learning within the incubator's eco-system. The results show that the participants learn through socially constructivist systems that are structured around the support provided by the incubators. Learning in this context takes place in an extended spectrum, and participants are more interested in learning from networking with experienced entrepreneurs rather than from other incubatees or formal courses. Findings of this study help incubator managers and novice entrepreneurs to better shape learning and teamwork in an effort to improve the learning process. Policy makers should consider introducing schemes that encourage novice entrepreneurs to exhibit the creativity and innovation behaviour reported by experienced entrepreneurs.

The focus of this study is primarily on incubators as the context of learning, whereas the macro-environmental factors, such as the socio-cultural and regulatory environments in China, were considered as playing a subtle role and would affect the incubatees' learning indirectly. The paper is based on a relatively small sample size and is geographically located in Ningbo, China. As such, the authors call for further research for comparative studies with a larger sample size so that a possible theory of entrepreneurial learning in the context of incubators might emerge in the future.

When a major Russian energy provider introduced a new technology that required organisational adjustment, the company’s management was surprised by the degree of internal resistance these changes provoked. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors took reference to the work on readiness to change and studied how the future time perspective, which connects with early writings by Lewin (1942), would explain the attitudes and behaviour of 148 managers.

The findings indicate that only a small number of employees perceived the future as offering many opportunities and showed willingness to pursue them. The majority of employees are either fearful of future changes, or do not have a strong sense of belonging to the company and hence are disinterested in prospective opportunities within the firm.

The different constructs of the future introduce an emic perspective to the study of organisational change and answer calls to enrich the measurements that are currently in use.

The purpose of this paper is to create a better understanding of how entrepreneurial education research has evolved with regard to pedagogy over the past decades.

The authors employed systematic review methodology to enable an in-depth analysis of the literature in a process that was both replicable and transparent. Guided by the research purpose, the systematic review of 395 articles published between January 1980 and December 2018 was influenced by a configurative approach aimed at interpreting and understanding the phenomenon under study.

The analysis suggests that the scholarly discourse on pedagogy in entrepreneurial education research has developed over time from teacher-guided instructional models to more constructivist perspectives. A shift in the literature was also observed, where scholarly discussions moved from addressing the issue of teachability to a greater emphasis on learnability. Contemporary discussions centre on the theoretical and philosophical foundations of experience-based teaching and learning.

The study illustrates how entrepreneurial education has evolved into a distinct research theme, characterized by a practice-oriented research agenda that emphasizes the need to connect teaching to “real-world” environments. The practice-oriented agenda has led to continued societal interest in promoting entrepreneurial education, while at the same time creating low academic legitimacy.