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This chapter examines the impact of smart city projects on the economic and business environment, with a specific focus on their potential to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. It highlights how smart cities create an enabling environment for new businesses, start-ups, and promotes gender and green entrepreneurship, while enhancing urban properties and contributing to the overall entrepreneurial ecosystem. The exponential growth of smart city projects worldwide has underscored the critical relationship between smart cities and the entrepreneurial ecosystem for city prosperity and competitiveness. This chapter explores the interplay between smart cities and the economic environment, emphasizing their role as hubs for innovation and business creation. It analyzes the influence of smart city ecosystems and economic factors on local growth and economic outcomes, drawing on international research and factual data. This chapter evaluates the economic outcomes of smart cities, including their impact on the economic environment, business creation, start-ups, innovative and green companies, as well as gender entrepreneurship. This chapter emphasizes the significance of smart city implementation in driving economic advancements within both the urban and economic landscapes. Finally, this chapter concludes by presenting a conceptual framework that synthesizes the insights gained, providing a comprehensive understanding of the economic impact of smart cities and offering a roadmap for further exploration of this topic.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of the regional business environment on local firm innovation, considering various dimensions such as administrative, financial and legal environments.

Multiple regression analysis is employed to analyze archival data for firms listed on Chinese stock markets.

We find that the optimizations of the administrative and financial environments positively affect firm innovation, whereas the legal environment does not exert a similar impact. Our analysis also reveals that the business environment’s optimization significantly influences innovation in firms that are small, non-state-owned and operating in high-tech industries. Furthermore, the business environment acts as a moderating variable in the relationship between firm innovation and firm value.

This study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of institutional-level determinants of firm innovation, highlighting the nuances of the legal environment and the importance of context-specific analysis, especially in emerging markets like China.

Developing countries can significantly enhance firm innovation by improving the business environment, including the optimization of administrative and financial systems, reducing transaction costs and ensuring capital supply. Tailored legal frameworks and alternative institutional strategies may also be explored.

This study explicitly emphasizes the governmental role in promoting firm innovation, shedding light on policy formulation and strategic alignment with local administrative policies.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to explore the relationship between the business environment and firm innovation using World Bank indicators in an emerging market context, providing novel insights into the unique dynamics of legal, financial and administrative sub-environments.

This paper aims to explore the impact of business environment on high-quality economic development (HQED) and clarify the role of technological innovation and government intervention in this relationship.

Based on China’s provincial panel data from 2010 to 2019, this paper adopts the system generalized method of moments to empirically analyze the influential mechanism and heterogeneity of the business environment on HQED. Furthermore, the authors construct a dynamic panel threshold model to test the threshold effect of government intervention.

The results indicate that optimizing the business environment can significantly promote HQED, technological innovation plays a partial mediating role in the impact of business environment on HQED, mainly by enhancing the intensity of innovation input and increasing innovation output to facilitate HQED. Government intervention can regulate the impact of business environment on HQED, and there is a double threshold effect, and it possesses an inverted U-shaped feature of first promoting and then inhibiting.

This paper examines the influence path of business environment on HQED from the perspective of technological innovation and government intervention, filling the gap in the study of provincial business environment. Moreover, the conclusions furnish a theoretical basis for optimizing the business environment and facilitating the HQED in China.

The study aims to examine the impacts of management practices on innovation along with the mediating and moderating role of degree of competition, business environment and environmental policies.

Data were derived from the World Bank Enterprise Survey 2019 for Greece, Italy, Turkey, Portugal and Jordan and analyzed by using PLS-SEM to find results.

Findings revealed that management practices have positive significant relationship with the innovation among firms for Greece, Turkey, Portugal and Jordan but surprisingly insignificant relationship in Italy. Further, management practices have positive significant relationship with the environmental policies, business environment and degree of competition among firms in Greece, Italy, Turkey, Portugal and Jordan. In addition, environmental policies, business environment and degree of competition have positive significant relationship with innovation among firms in Greece, Italy, Turkey, Portugal and Jordan.

These useful insights would enable practitioners and policy makers to develop and apply more influential management practices to boost up the level of innovation among firms.

Although the topics of management practices and innovation have received a great concern of academia, but this is the first study that offers a comprehensive model of the relationship in these domains.

South African business organisations operate in an environment that is changing rapidly. One of the key drivers of this change is advances in information technology (IT). Accountants are educated at various tertiary institutions to prepare them to be competent as information and knowledge workers in the South African business environment. This article aims to determine the nature and demands of the South African business and the IT environment in which accountants must function. This analysis identifies the context within which IT skills are applied by accountants by investigating the South African business and IT environment to determine how educational institutions could ensure that the students they deliver possess the critical IT skills they need to be competent in the South African business environment.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate the effect of entrepreneurial competencies and the moderating effect of business environment on business success in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia.

A sample of 212 Malaysian SME owner‐founders participated in this study. The structural equation modeling (SEM) procedure was used to test the proposed model.

The results showed that entrepreneurial competencies were strong predictors of business success in SMEs in Malaysia. It was also found that the association between entrepreneurial competencies and business success was more strongly evident in hostile and dynamic environments than in more benign and stable environments.

Self‐report was used as the source of all data. This approach, even though criticised by some, was deemed necessary because of difficulties associated with the independent assessment of each of these variables. Nevertheless, future studies should identify ways to obtain competency data from multiple informants to minimise the possibility of response bias.

It was suggested that understanding business success through the lens of entrepreneurial competencies is important because it provides entrepreneurs with knowledge about the way they should operate their business and encourages them to be conscious of the potential positive or negative impacts of their own behaviour.

The study shows that entrepreneurs are capable of minimising the negative impact of business environment if they are willing to equip themselves with the appropriate competencies.