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Despite the increasing number of small and medium enterprises pursuing international opportunities and penetrating global markets, international entrepreneurship literature has paid limited attention to emerging markets and entrepreneur-specific factors that influence internationalisation. Traditional internationalisation theories and international entrepreneurship theories consider organisation as the unit of analysis and lack sensitivity to the context, which influences ventures’ foreign market decisions. Moreover, only a handful of studies related to internationalisation in emerging markets are available. To address this gap, this chapter explores barriers and drivers for SMEs’ internationalisation in Sri Lanka, an emerging market. Semi-structured interviews with forty Sri Lankan youth entrepreneurs suggest structural barriers consisting of access to capital, legal restrictions and lack of legal, institutional and government support were prominent. These barriers suggest a need for policy changes in the entrepreneurial environment, finance, entrepreneurial culture and skill development, technology, research and development and regional balance. The findings also indicate that information communication technology is a driver for internationalisation.

This chapter uses discourse analysis to explain why entrepreneurship has become a primary response to Africa’s youth employment challenge. It analyses almost 20 years of academic literature and publications from one of the world’s foremost authorities on entrepreneurship: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The study found that youth were positioned within a discourse of entrepreneurial essentialism; where entrepreneurship was narrativised as the only option for youth employment; and youth were framed as entrepreneurship being the natural solution for them. Youth were concurrently framed within numerous contradictory entrepreneurial discourses which were used to elevate and legitimise entrepreneurship as the key pathway for addressing Africa’s youth employment challenge. An important finding in this study was that the dominant model of entrepreneurship being promoted by GEM to address the challenge is a mainly skills-based pathway to self-employment and low-growth microenterprise development. This is concerning for two reasons: firstly, global evidence does not demonstrate much support for such an approach, and secondly, it undermines other responses to youth unemployment, particularly those which seek to address more structural, demand-side barriers to employment.

Purpose: The best way of improving youth entrepreneurs’ success rates is to provide youth entrepreneurs with quality support, skills, and resources to be better equipped and willing to make any decision that makes them creative with time. This chapter explores youth entrepreneurship in the MENA region as educating young people about entrepreneurship is crucial today and is about developing new businesses in the region.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter mainly aims at the role of academia in boosting entrepreneurship among young people in the UAE. Then the literature provides insights on the substantial gender effect on becoming an entrepreneur and the region’s job market.

Findings: Our research indicates that the global economy is witnessing a sudden rise in entrepreneurship in all life areas, based on current world dynamics. Thus, young people must learn and accomplish skills that promote creativity for doing business. For young people to have the requisite skills to start their businesses, educational programs must be in line with industry requirements.

Originality/value: This chapter of the book focuses on youth entrepreneurship, which would help upcoming researchers and students grasp good knowledge about entrepreneurship’s importance. It also recommends relevant research areas on MENA youth entrepreneurship support programs.

Recent interest in social entrepreneurship among young people has led to a heightened interest in new research. Few studies, however, have yet to investigate motivators of involvement, particularly from countries that are new to social entrepreneurship. The current study set out to better understand this phenomenon among young social entrepreneurs in Malaysia. In-depth one-to-one interviews with 12 young entrepreneurs were carried out to collect the data. Four themes and ten sub-themes emerged from the interviews, including early life experience (childhood experience and family experience), inspiration from clients and colleagues (interactions with the target group and exposure to social entrepreneurs), work-related experience (volunteer experience and job-related experience), and personal meaning (contribute back to society, desire for more meaning in life, and personal passions). The implications for policy-makers and interested parties are outlined in regard to enhancing participation and interest among youth for social entrepreneurship.

Young entrepreneurs' involvement in social entrepreneurship is gaining momentum, and the impact of their active participation in social enterprises is tremendous. As younger generation creates and leads social enterprises, self-identity that entails their leadership can bring benefits to various stakeholders. In particular, the engagement of younger generation in social entrepreneurship lead to positive identity development that brings impact not only to the founders but also to the employees, volunteers and recipients of the product and services offered by the social enterprise. In this context, the chapter explains the importance of social entrepreneurship in society-building, looking into how it creates values to its participants in regard to personal growth and development. The objective of this chapter is to elucidate the role of social enterprises in developing the personal identity of the younger generation. The chapter maps the characteristics of social entrepreneurs to the characteristics of young people with focus on the development of personal, social and role identities. The chapter also explains the significance of young social entrepreneurs' participation in social activities for the identity formation and how it directly and indirectly contributes to a balanced societal development.

There is an evolving literature on criminal entrepreneurship which situates it as a sub-topic of the organised crime literature and either mythologies and elevates the criminal entrepreneur to Mafioso status or ascribes it to being an activity carried out by criminal cartels; or else it trivialises and minimises it as being ‘White-Collar Criminality’. In reality, entrepreneurship pervades everyday criminal life as it pervades the everyday practices of policing. In this chapter, the author acknowledges the existence of a ‘Crimino-Entrepreneurial Interface’ populated by a cast of criminal actors including the ubiquitous ‘Businessman Gangster’. These criminally entrepreneurial actors operate within a specific milieu or ‘Enterprise Model of Crime’ and operate alongside the legitimate ‘Entrepreneurial Business Community’. Within the two conjoined systems, there is a routine exchange of interactions either parasitical or symbiotic and these coalesce to form an ecosystem of enterprise crime in which it is not only the ubiquitous criminal entrepreneur who is present but a veritable cast of entrepreneurially motivated criminal actors. As well as the established business community there is a parallel, alternative community which is situated in the so-called ‘Criminal Areas’ where the traditional criminal fraternity carry out their nefarious entrepreneurial activities. Within such areas, an underclass exists which provides the criminal workforce for organised crime. The traditional criminal ecosystem is the natural habitat for the police, and it is around this activity that police are traditionally organised. A perpetual cycle of crime is set up which requires policing, but this leaves an unpoliced void which the entrepreneurial criminals exploit. It is necessary to understand the criminal places and spaces exploited by Organised Crime and what roles other criminal actors and facilitators play in the enterprise model. It is also necessary to understand the so-called ‘Perverse Model of Policing’ which distorts and magnifies the true scale of the problem and to appreciate how Serious and Organised Crime corrupt and infiltrate the legitimate ‘upperworld’ before one can understand the true scale of entrepreneurialism in policing and criminal contexts.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework of economic development of Algeria with a particular focus on youth entrepreneurship. Drawing on the opportunity-based approach of Drucker (1985) and the impact analysis theory (IAT) advocated by Murphy and Marvel (2008), Lenjo (2015), and Dontigney (2018), this proposed conceptual framework theoretically allows the integration of different perspectives including economic development of a country and youth entrepreneurship. In principle, the opportunity-based theory posits that entrepreneurship represents a response to a stimulus, through a business venture, where an unemployed person exploits opportunities engendered by social, technological, and cultural changes in the environment. The IAT is a paradigm that deconstructs the causes and effects of a phenomenon (i.e. youth entrepreneurship) to afford greater understanding and appreciation of the research agenda, while providing an indicative assessment of the overall impact of the issue (OECD, 2014). The authors discuss the core barriers (venture capital, foreign direct investments, bureaucratic obstacles, gender discrimination, and soft skills) to entrepreneurship in Algeria, Furthermore, the authors assess the different economic forces in Algeria that appear to be promoting or sustaining entrepreneurship, particularly in young people. These forces have a tendency to be connected to a broader possibility of economic development. Further analysis is required that demonstrates the potential upsides of promoting youth entrepreneurship. Thus, the authors attempt to answer a key question: What can be done to engage the youth in small business entrepreneurship across Algeria and thus implement a sustainable solution to the country’s employment problem?

The current chapter is one of the first studies to specifically address the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) for entrepreneurship development in the disadvantaged context of Sierra Leone. It highlights the important role of CSOs in the petty trading (disadvantaged) entrepreneurial ecosystem. Based on qualitative analysis of interviewers undertaken with two CSOs and three entrepreneurial firms from disadvantaged backgrounds, our findings offer interesting insights into this phenomenon. The authors find that in the context of disadvantaged entrepreneurship development, CSOs are seen as more trustworthy by the general population than the government (public bodies). The government, through the national youth commission, also tried to collaborate with CSOs regarding entrepreneurial skills development in disadvantaged entrepreneurs. The findings further reveal that despite the appreciation of the role of CSOs for disadvantaged entrepreneurship development by public authorities in recent years, they still face many bureaucratic hurdles and delays in operations. Finally, our chapter reveals several dynamics associated with skills and competencies development in disadvantaged entrepreneurship in the Sierra Leone-specific context, where skills such as basic business planning, livestock handling, and financial management emerge as being highly useful.