Dra. Yañez-Valdes, Claudia

Entrepreneurship and technology have been strongly connected over the last decades. The growth of digital technology and external factors have brought entrepreneurs new opportunities and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has reevaluated the relationship between digitalization and innovative business models. Like any entrepreneurial process, entrepreneurs face a complex adaptation process that determines their success or failure. We reviewed 208 articles published in the past decade to identify trends related to the determinants and impacts of digital entrepreneurship pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show trends in the definitions used, the relationship between external and internal factors that enable the exploration of available digital technologies for emerging business models, and the value digital entrepreneurs create for social, economic, and technological developments. Our study proposes a multidimensional framework and discusses challenges and opportunities.

Digital technologies have a significant potential for collaboration, designing, and implementing better business initiatives. COVID-19 global lockdowns have increased the emergence of the Digital Social Entrepreneurship (DSE) phenomenon, which has been key in responding to social needs using digital technologies. The DSE scholarly discussion has been limited to a few studies. Therefore, little is known about theoretical foundations that explain the intersection between digital, social, and entrepreneurship. Based on an integrative literature review and a thematic case study, this study theorizes the micro-foundations of digital-social value-creation and explores the flourishment of the DSE phenomenon during/after the global lockdowns. Our findings contribute to the literature by extending the DSE definition and identifying the fostering (micro, meso, and macro) conditions involved in the digital-social value-creation process. Several implications emerged from the DSE learning, adaptation, and co-creation strategies/practices.