Pandemic Makers: How Citizen Groups Mobilized Resources to Meet Local Needs in a Global Health Crisis: ET&P

The enormous scale of suffering, breadth of societal impact, and ongoing uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced dynamics seldom examined in the crisis entrepreneurship literature. Previous research indicates that when a crisis causes a failure of public goods, spontaneous citizen ventures often emerge to leverage unique local knowledge to rapidly customize abundant external resources to meet immediate needs. However, as outsiders, emergent citizen groups responding to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment at the onset of COVID-19 lacked local knowledge and legitimacy. In this study, we examine how entrepreneurial citizens mobilized collective resources in attempts to gain acceptance and meet local needs amid the urgency of the pandemic. Through longitudinal case studies of citizen groups connected to makerspaces in four U.S. cities, we study how they adapted to address the resource and legitimacy limitations they encountered. We identify three mechanisms—augmenting, circumventing, and attenuating—that helped transient citizen groups calibrate their resource mobilization based on what they learned over time. We highlight how extreme temporality imposes limits on resourcefulness and legitimation, making it critical for collective entrepreneurs to learn when to work within their limitations rather than try to overcome them.

Weathering a Crisis: A Multi-Level Analysis of Resilience in Young Ventures: ET&P

In the context of the external disruption presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate (1) how individual-level resilience and inter-functional coordination relate to organizational resilience and (2) the link between organizational resilience and firm performance. We view organizational resilience as a resource-based capability and draw on insights regarding psychological capital and relational resources to inform our hypotheses. Our hypotheses are tested with a time-lagged, multi-level study of young technology ventures. The results show that when such firms are resilient, they tend to perform significantly better in a crisis. Further, organizational resilience is positively influenced by the individual resilience of top management team members, as well as inter-functional coordination. We discuss implications for theory and practice and suggest avenues for research on resilience in entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship Research in Times of COVID-19: Experiences from South America

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has had diverse effects on the population and businesses. Due to their low visibility, there is a significant knowledge gap for the scientific community regarding the situation of South American entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this systematic review aims to answer the following research questions: What scientific evidence is available on entrepreneurship in South America during the COVID-19 pandemic? From which countries do the studies originate? What conclusions do they present, and what lessons can be learned from them? The Scopus and Scielo databases were explored in this systematic review. Due to the diversity of languages in which articles from this region are published, searches were conducted in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. In each case, we searched for results containing the words COVID-19 and entrepreneurship (emprendimiento in Spanish, empreendedorismo in Portuguese) in the title, , or keywords. The initial search produced 783 records, which were filtered based on seven criteria, resulting in 15 articles. The final articles identified had corresponding authors affiliated with South American institutions. We conclude that, in South America, some entrepreneurs recognize the importance of maintaining the economic stability of their employees and communities in addition to sustaining their businesses. Their actions serve as case studies of resilience and perseverance in adverse circumstances. © 2023 by the authors.

Technology adaptation: micro new ventures in a COVID-19 lockdown

Purpose: There is a paucity of evidence on how small new ventures cope with shifts from physical space to cyberspace imposed by external crises, such as pandemics. Further, even though the concept of space is highly relevant to understanding entrepreneurship, the concept has been underutilised in entrepreneurship research. In particular, the potential of understanding entrepreneurship in terms of the interplay between physical space and cyberspace is yet to be explored. The authors address these research gaps by pursuing the following research question: How did micro new ventures experience the shift from physical space to cyberspace (technology adaptation) imposed by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis? Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with founders of start-ups associated with two incubators, in Spain and Monaco. Thematic analysis of interview transcripts was conducted, approaching the data with the focus on firm positioning in "real” space and in cyberspace and on possible transformations of business models. Findings: The pandemic opened new opportunities for small new ventures, as many start-ups were successful in shifting into cyberspace by undergoing a radical digital transformation and ended up with more scalable business models and in many cases transformed themselves into micro-multinationals. Research limitations/implications: Overall, firms tended to shift from physical space to cyberspace, following the firms' customers to cyberspace, finding new and more international, customers in cyberspace or guiding the firms' existing customer base into cyberspace. Firms that maintained the pre-pandemic position were either already fully digital or had sufficient resources to hold position in the anticipation of the post-pandemic future. Originality/value: The authors introduce the concept of cyberspace in the context of entrepreneurship studies and explore the trajectories of firms in a crisis. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.

China's auto industry: regimes of production and industrial policy in the age of electric cars

This article discusses China's industrial and labour policy for the automotive industry facing the transition to the era of new energy vehicles. A conceptual framework on the regimes of production is employed to analyse the present transformation of industry structures in production models and labour markets. The growth of private-capitalist regimes of high-performance, low wages, and high profit incentives for workers is identified, which can be described as the 'Foxconnisation' of the industry, and it is at the expense of the corporate-bureaucratic regimes prevalent among the leading Sino-foreign joint ventures. As production networks become vertically disintegrated, some non-traditional industrial players are highlighted in the discussion of some recent developments in the industry during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The profound transformation in the regimes of production brought about social contradictions related to the production process, and new challenges and implications for workplace policies. The empirical study of this article confirms the necessity of trade union strategies inside China from an international perspective in order to ensure social standards and a more sustainable green transformation of the industry.

Innovation in times of crisis: The relevance of digitalization and early internationalization strategies

Using the resource-based view, we examine the roles of international and digital orientations as determinants of the digitalization and the early internationalization strategies of international new ventures (INVs). We also examine the effect of implementing those strategies on the innovation performance of INVs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We tested this conceptual framework by using structural equation modeling (AMOS) on a database of 213 INVs. The results indicate that international orientation is a fundamental determinant of both strategies, while digital orientation only fosters a digitalization strategy. Moreover, both strategies were critical to increase innovation performance during the pandemic. This study expands the literature in the field of international entrepreneurship in three different ways: i) it highlights the relevance of innovation performance for INVs during the pandemic;ii) it underlines the relevance of both the early internationalization and the digitization strategies to promote innovation performance;and iii) it reinforces the importance of international and digital orientations as critical resources for defining strategy. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

E-commerce Policy Environment, Digital Platform, and Internationalization of Chinese New Ventures: The Moderating Effects of Covid-19 Pandemic.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study investigates how institutional pressure can affect digital platform risk. Specifically, it examines whether two types of institutional pressure - domestic market e-commerce policy uncertainty and foreign market e-commerce policy uncertainty - affect the perceived digital platform risk for international new ventures (INVs) and its relationship with their scope of internationalization. The recent crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has further impacted this new phenomenon, thus we examine its effects on the relationships between/among domestic and foreign market e-commerce policy uncertainties, digital platform risk, and the internationalization scope of INVs. We conduct four waves of a survey to test the Covid-19 effects as well as to minimize common method bias, analyzing the final sample of 394 responses from 260 Chinese INVs using structural equation modeling. The results show that domestic and foreign market e-commerce policy uncertainties positively affect the digital platform risk for INVs, with foreign market e-commerce policy uncertainty having a stronger positive impact. Moreover, we find that the Covid-19 pandemic interacts asymmetrically with the relationship between domestic vs. foreign market e-commerce policy uncertainty and the digital platform risk for INVs. In addition, the pandemic strengthens the negative relationship between digital platform risk and the internationalization scope of INVs. This research broadens and strengthens our understanding of e-commerce policy and international business in the context of INVs' internationalization.

Digital Maturity of Educational Project Leaders in Europe

Turbulent and unstable times caused by COVID-19 pandemic showed the importance of such skills like adaptability to changing environment, openness to challenges and ability to undergo digital transformation, especially among the leaders of international ventures, such as education Erasmus+ education projects. The term of digital transformation is a vast notion which not only focuses on the usage of information and communication technologies, implementation of new business models based on ICT or introducing new services for clients in the digital world, but it is also a change observed in the raising level of technical skills among the leaders. In this study, based on the research which was carried out among 990 Erasmus+ project leaders, the issue of relation between digital maturity of project leaders and the projects' sustainability is raised. The discussion will also include the digital dimension of transnational cooperation and place it in the broader context of relational view and network paradigm in modern science of management as well as in the context of strategic management. © 2022 WMSCI.All rights reserved.

A cloud's silver lining? The impact of policy interventions on new and maturing technology ventures' online recruitment

Research summary: We synthesize the external enablement (EE) framework with insights from labor economics and strategic human capital to theorize how restrictive policy interventions shape technology ventures' employee recruitment, attending to both sides of the hiring dyad. We engage in a quantitative study of over 220,000 recruiting interactions between technology ventures and candidates on a prominent digital networking platform surrounding the early COVID-19 pandemic policy responses. We find that firms' recruitment declined significantly while candidates' responsiveness increased during the early COVID-19 policy interventions. In turn, young technology ventures were enabled to hire more during the interventions, whereas maturing ventures were enabled to hire differently—acquiring candidates with greater entrepreneurial orientation. Our work extends the EE framework to human resource strategies and to heterogeneous enablement across firm age. Managerial summary: Hiring is a critical task for young and maturing venture firms, and environmental disruptions can impinge heavily on recruiting processes. We study how restrictive policy interventions shape technology ventures' employee recruitment. Examining over 220,000 recruiting interactions on a major digital platform before and during the early COVID-19 policy responses, we find that restrictive policy interventions alter the technology venture labor market, deterring some firms from recruiting while making others more successful in their continued hiring efforts. Furthermore, we discover that maturing firms are more adaptive than young firms in their selection of candidates during policy interventions—seeking employees with more entrepreneurial characteristics. © 2023 Strategic Management Society.

Application of analysis on the impact of major public health events on special work of chemical enterprises

In order to reveal the impact of Covid-19 on special work of chemical production enterprises in China, including Chinese funded, Sino foreign joint venture, foreign funded and foreign funded joint venture enterprises. The mutual influences between the two were studied by collecting safety commitment and Covid-19 logs in Zhejiang Province, and correlation method and event study were adopted. Although the level of Covid-19 was lowered to level 3 on March 23 by Zhejiang Province, it would take 46 days, 31 days, 61 days and 46 days for the four types to return to the normal special work level respectively. Therefore, for similar major public health events, chemical production enterprises should timely avoid their impact on special operation activities related to normal inspections and maintenances. © 2022 ACM.

Digitalization: The Norm of the "New Normal”: Impact of Digital Economy Ventures on the National Competitiveness of an Emerging Market

The challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic have made it an undeniable fact that digital technologies provide the strongest means to transform industries and markets. Technology ventures bear a notable role in supplying these tools to incumbents, governments, and indeed to small conventional companies, which all thrive to adjust themselves to the "new normal.” Thereupon, this chapter seeks to examine the impact of digital economy ventures by demonstrating their role to advance digital transformation efforts in an emerging market context. In doing so, it depicts striking examples from Turkey regarding;(i) the collaboration between incumbents and digital economy ventures, (ii) the rise of new stars exploiting digital economy opportunities, and (iii) the ventures using digitalization to create social impact for extremely vulnerable actors. © 2022 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

United we stand: the entrepreneurs network and its role in overcoming crisis situations

PurposeThe present study aims to understand the role of the network of a woman entrepreneur in helping the business during a crisis with a focus on the stakeholders, namely, the suppliers and the customers. Design/methodology/approachCase study method is used to address the research objectives and a case of a woman entrepreneur based in India is selected for the same purpose. An interpretive approach is used to understand the underlying phenomenon. FindingsThe analysis of the case illustrates how the three major aspects of the network, i.e. content, governance and structure, manifest from the supplier and the customers' side and how do the same change during a crisis and may help the entrepreneur to overcome the crisis. Research limitations/implicationsThe present study contributes to the theory of "network success hypotheses of entrepreneurship theory" by offering a manifestation of the same during a crisis faced by the entire network of the entrepreneur. Practical implicationsThe findings provide insights on how an entrepreneur can use innovative ways of rethinking of the strategies during a crisis without compromising on the basic philosophy of the company. Originality/valueThe present study is one of a kind to identify the interplay between the entrepreneurial networks both from the customer and supplier sides of the firm during a crisis.

Innovation in times of crisis: The relevance of digitalization and early internationalization strategies

Using the resource-based view, we examine the roles of international and digital orientations as determinants of the digitalization and the early internationalization strategies of international new ventures (INVs). We also examine the effect of implementing those strategies on the innovation performance of INVs during the COVID-19 pandemic. We tested this conceptual framework by using structural equation modeling (AMOS) on a database of 213 INVs. The results indicate that international orientation is a fundamental determinant of both strategies, while digital orientation only fosters a digitalization strategy. Moreover, both strategies were critical to increase innovation performance during the pandemic. This study expands the literature in the field of international entrepreneurship in three different ways: i) it highlights the relevance of innovation performance for INVs during the pandemic;ii) it underlines the relevance of both the early internationalization and the digitization strategies to promote innovation performance;and iii) it reinforces the importance of international and digital orientations as critical resources for defining strategy.

The evolving international entrepreneurship orientations and international entrepreneurship capital in the rapidly changing and digitizing international environments

The relationship between entrepreneurial orientations and internationalization has been examined extensively, but the recent developments in the rapidly changing environment point to the need for further examination of international entrepreneurs’ orientations in their own embedding contexts and beyond. There is ample evidence suggesting a positive relationship between the firm’s combined overall international entrepreneurial orientation, its extent of innovativeness, export (or international marketing), collaborative, and socio-cultural orientations and the scope and speed of its internationalization. The aim of this article is to examine the challenges and developments among the integral components of international entrepreneurial orientations and their associated activities, strategies, and resources to integrate their interactive impacts for better understanding of the broader concepts of international entrepreneurship orientations and international entrepreneurship capital in the increasing complexities of entrepreneurial internationalization processes.

The world has a unique opportunity: Accelerating technology transfer and vaccine production through partnerships

The global roll-out of vaccines is crucial to defeating the pandemic, but the lack of technical know-how and manufacturing infrastructure for production are constraining the speedy provision of vaccines globally. This will remain true even if the intellectual property rights of COVID-19 vaccines are waived temporarily. To accelerate technology transfer and global vaccine production, this article calls for the promotion of joint ventures between global COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers and local pharmaceutical companies so as to create regional manufacturing hubs. These joint ventures must be supported financially by global North countries, international organisations, and host-country governments. This approach will incentivize pharmaceutical companies to share not only their patents but also tacit production knowledge because the risk and cost of setting up new facilities will be shared. In this paper, we show how the joint venture approach will have benefits for all the actors involve and generate positive impact on Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions over the long run. Following these policy proposals will not only help protect the global community from COVID-19 but will also present a rare window of opportunity to stimulate the life science industry in the global South, supporting sustainable economic and technological development.

Nomad Librarianship: Outreach Challenges and New Horizons in the Remote Hospital Library Setting

The article presents the discussion on outreach and remote hospital librarianship. Topics include clinical librarian showing new territory for the author causing moments of pause and concern navigating the most effective outreach methods working from home;and COVID-19 pandemic amplifying the need for virtual services and resources best serving the fluctuating workforce and patron base of hospital libraries.

Women's Ventures Resilience and COVID-19 Crisis: A Lesson to Success in Time of Crisis

We complement this research by addressing the question of how entrepreneurial ventures can be resilient in the face of adversity in Times of Crisis. First, we conducted a comprehensive web search to find women's entrepreneurial ventures. Based on web search results, we conducted Online interviews with 90 women entrepreneurs working in many types of ventures. Second, we surveyed innovative actions that help women's entrepreneurial ventures resilience. Building on these insights, we identified a variety of innovative actions to help women's entrepreneurial ventures resilience in times of crisis. We identify five specific types of innovative actions to address venture resilience: Preventive and Supportive, Analytical, Financial risk management, Collaborative competition, and Effectual entrepreneurship. We aim to further nuance our understanding of the COVID-19 crisis results as a challenge for women's entrepreneurial ventures. We suggest key insights on ventures resilience for entrepreneurship Policymakers. © 2022, Institute of Economic Sciences. All rights reserved.

The Problems and Promise of Entrepreneurial Partnerships: Decision-Making, Overconfidence, and Learning in Founding Teams

How should decision-making be organized in entrepreneurial teams when founders exhibit confidence biases? New ventures are commonly founded by teams of entrepreneurs, who must employ a decision-making structure that implicitly or explicitly defines how individual beliefs are aggregated into team decisions. We consider this issue through the lens of organizational economics, which focuses on decision-making governance. Using a computational model, we consider three archetypal decision-making structures: partnership voting, a boss with employees, and a buyout option (partnership convertible to boss structure). We highlight the conditions under which partnership voting is an effective means of governing market entry and exit decisions when teams' decision-making is informed by efforts to learn about the merits of uncertain opportunities. The promise of partnership voting is realized when entrepreneurs are either unbiased or optimistic about their likelihood of success. Partnership voting is problematic when entrepreneurs differ in their biases or respond too rapidly to new information, in which case a buyout option is better. From a policy perspective, we show that confidence biases may be managed by selectively matching the decision-making structure to entrepreneurs' biases, and that doing so may substantially improve the performance of new ventures.

'Wildlife for Livestock': COVID-19, Tourism and Community Conservancies in Northern Kenya

The existence of pastoralism as it has been organised for hundreds of years is dependent on constant adaptation to ever-changing situations. Such adaptation includes crop agriculture, wage labour, and community conservancies. In northern Kenya, conservancies are epicentres of wildlife, nature tourism, and commercial ventures. This study incorporates methods and perspectives from history, anthropology, and development studies. The study shows that the shift to community conservancies has exposed pastoral communities to a fluctuating international economic system that has collapsed due to COVID-19 pandemic. The instability caused by the pandemic exposed the vulnerability of community conservancy as a livelihood system.

Driving Sustainable Innovation in New Ventures: A Study Based on the fsQCA Approach

With the external environment becoming increasingly complex and changeable, how we can effectively enhance the innovation of companies in sustainability has become the focus of research. For startups, due to their lack of resources and poor independent innovation capabilities, they need to search for external knowledge from outside to meet their own needs. Therefore, obtaining external knowledge sources and adopting appropriate methods for knowledge search is the key to affecting innovation in sustainability. Moreover, enterprise capability is also an important factor restricting sustainable innovation. In this paper, we construct an integrated framework of resources and capabilities based on theoretical learning and practice between 2018 and 2021, containing technical knowledge, market knowledge, a formal search, an informal search, organizational learning, and strategic flexibility. Taking 450 new ventures in China as the research sample, we adopt the fsQCA method and derive the path driving the sustainable innovation of new ventures. The results show that resources and enterprise capabilities combine to influence sustainable innovation, and there are two configuration paths driving the sustainable innovation of new ventures. In the first pathway, a technical knowledge search, a market knowledge search, organizational learning and strategic flexibility are the core conditions;in the second pathway, a formal search, an informal search, organizational learning, and strategic flexibility are the core conditions.