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The purpose of this paper is to examine how early-stage entrepreneurs' opportunity motivation impacts their choice of market growth strategies as well as the contingent roles of institutional environments and product market conditions in Africa.

The study employs hierarchical linear modeling to test multilevel models with nested data empirically.

The findings show that African early-stage entrepreneurs who are opportunity-driven and from countries with strong institutional environments have a higher tendency to adopt market exploration strategies. African early-stage entrepreneurs from countries with strong product market conditions have a higher tendency to adopt market penetration strategies. Further interaction tests show that both contingency conditions, namely institutional environments and product market conditions, moderate the effects of opportunity motivation on market growth strategies of African early-stage entrepreneurs.

The study shows that policymakers in Africa need to develop flexible, supportive market-related policies based on entrepreneurs' growth paths, institutional environments and product market conditions.

The study is the first to explore multilevel influences on early-stage entrepreneurs' market growth strategies in Africa. It sheds new insights on the entrepreneurial marketing process of early-stage entrepreneurs in Africa.

The purpose of this paper is to advance and investigate empirically how entrepreneurial attitude and normative beliefs influence managerial scanning for competitive intelligence and how managerial scanning efforts subsequently impact managerial interpretation of organizations' strengths and weaknesses in the competitive arena.

A structural equation model was tested with survey data from 309 managers in the USA.

The results indicate that entrepreneurial attitude orientation and market orientation significantly impact managerial scanning for competitive intelligence, which in turn leads to managerial representations of competitive advantage.

This paper demonstrates that scanning for competitive intelligence is more an entrepreneurial activity than a routine activity for managers, and that managerial scanning efforts can be maximized in highly market‐oriented organizations that value competitive intelligence collection and dissemination. Proactive scanning for competitive intelligence enables managers to develop a fuller picture of the superiority or deficiency of their organizations. Future research needs to address the inherent cyclicity of the managerial sense‐making process.

This paper is the first effort to examine empirically the scanning cycle – that is, the relationships between managerial business motivation, intelligence scanning and sense‐making. It offers strategic guides to both academicians and practitioners on how to achieve a better understanding of the complex and dynamic market through proactive scanning activities.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the time structure characteristics of collaborative knowledge production behaviors in Q&A (question-and-answer) communities for explicit and tacit knowledge, and systematically investigate the supply side and the demand side of knowledge production.

Taking Zhihu as the research object, using the methods of recurrence plot and recurrence quantification analysis, this paper analyzes the recursive characteristics of the motion trajectories of the three behavioral sequences of questioning, answering, and discussion, qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing the generation and evolution mechanism of explicit and tacit knowledge.

The results show that compared with the demand-side behavior sequence, the supply-side behavior sequence exhibits higher stability, complexity and periodicity. Compared with the tacit knowledge topics, the demand-side behavior sequence of the explicit knowledge topics shows stronger nonlinearity, and the supply-side behavior sequence shows lower complexity.

The research conclusions provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of the recurrence plot method in distinguishing different types of knowledge production behaviors and have important application value for the “crowdsourcing” knowledge generation and identification under the knowledge economy and the sustainable development of the socialized question-and-answer community.