Research Outputs
Determinants and impacts of digital entrepreneurship: A pre- and post-COVID-19 perspective
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.
Winds of change due to global lockdowns: Refreshing digital social entrepreneurship research paradigm
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.
Digital social entrepreneurship: the N-Helix response to stakeholders’ COVID-19 needs
This study explores the emergence of a new entrepreneurship phenomenon (digital social entrepreneurship) as a result of the collaboration among many agents (N-Helix), given the government’s limited capacity to respond to the stakeholders’ needs satisfaction related to an exogenous event (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Our theory development is based on three ongoing academic debates related to (a) the unrepresentativeness of the stakeholder theory in entrepreneurship research; (b) the emergence of digital social entrepreneurship (DSE) as a bridge between stakeholders’ needs, socio-economic actors, and digital-social initiatives; and (c) the role of N-Helix collaborations to facilitate the emergence of global knowledge-intensive initiatives and the rapid adoptions of open innovations. Our results support our assumptions about the positive mediation effect of DSE in the relationship between N-Helix collaborations and stakeholders’ satisfaction. Notably, results show how pandemic has intensified these relationships and how DSE in N-Helix collaborations can generate social impacts globally. Some implications for policy-makers have emerged from our results that should be considered during/post-COVID-19 pandemic.