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This article explores how leisure organisations developed entrepreneurial practices to enable innovation for the post-covid-19 pandemic era. Whilst entrepreneurship and innovation have been the subject of academic scrutiny in mainstream sport, there is a relative paucity of studies within the broader holistic context of leisure. Semi-structured interviews, conducted in the United Kingdom (UK), provide insights from nine high profile, globally recognised industry practitioners from across the leisure industry including the sport, entertainment, health and fitness, leisure, hospitality, arts and culture, events and tourism sectors. Four key themes emerged from the data including extending capabilities through (i) research and development (R&D) and (ii) digitalisation, and changing culture through (iii) diversification, and (iv) sustainability. These practices were shown to enable leisure organisations to create new customer value within an increasingly competitive environment. The paper concludes with an overview of theoretical and managerial implications and provides approaches for developing more entrepreneurial practices in leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although evidence shows that it is challenging to implement, many authors state that participatory management is a distinctive attribute of social enterprises. This paper presents case study research exploring how participatory management is manifest in Chile, a country where a paternalistic and autocratic management style prevails thereby constraining the adoption of more collaborative approaches. We found that a majority of the twenty social enterprises considered, despite having very different sizes, governance structure and activity sectors, involved employees and stakeholders in shared decision-making processes. Participatory management was exhibited in distinctive and diverse ways ranging from common agreement on strategic decisions through to the presentation of new proposals by members. We conclude that social enterprises in Chile differ from conventional enterprises not only in their focus on trying to solve social problems, but also in the fact that they may provide a vehicle to promote more innovative and participatory approaches to decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chilean doctoral programs in science and technology generally do not consider entrepreneurial training within their curricula. Taking an entrepreneurial competency approach, we explore the potential impact of introducing an entrepreneurship education course to doctoral students based within a non-commercial research environment. We identified two main areas of possible impact: the potential effects upon doctoral research projects and upon the doctoral students themselves. We followed the learning experiences of science and technology PhD students before, during, and a year after an entrepreneurial course through a multiple case study research design. Our results suggest that entrepreneurship education has a positive impact upon the development of student's creative problem-solving and communication skills. This was reported to have a generally positive effect upon the students' doctoral projects and on the student's self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions. We conclude that entrepreneurship education complements traditional doctoral training for students within a non-commercial academic setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider how the development of students' capabilities for identifying business opportunities is underpinned by a change in their opportunity-identification mental frames. We observe that students find it difficult to verbally articulate how their performance has changed, and yet such changes are reflected through radical shifts in their visual representations of entrepreneurship. We conclude that entrepreneurship courses need to change the way students perceive reality and interpret information to enable them to more effectively identify new business opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineties, postgraduate technology management education was mainly concentrated upon structuring the product development cycle and positioning technology strategy within the overall strategy of the company. Today it encompasses a much wider range of capabilities to address contemporary challenges such as globalization, open innovation, and the need for corporate renewal and venturing. To gain insight into the implications of this change, we conducted a number of exploratory interviews with leaders from both the demand and supply sides in Europe based in higher education institutes, the corporate sector, and public institutes. Our interviews highlight a dynamic field moving from traditional MBA-focused programs toward more entrepreneurial "boot camps," from a case study-oriented teaching style toward a mentoring approach, and from an emphasis upon general business toward working across disciplines yet being sensitive to underlying technologies. We found important implications for technology management education with respect to its location within universities and identified opportunities for business schools to provide technology entrepreneurship and commercialization skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the sensemaking processes entrepreneurs use when transitioning between venture ideas and venture formation. Adopting a sensemaking/sensegiving approach and utilising an interpretivist methodology, we use sensemaking to analyse the entrepreneurial journey of four diverse entrepreneurs. In so doing, we make three contributions: first, we locate the early stages of the entrepreneurial context as a primary site where sensemaking occurs as entrepreneurs deal with the differences between expectations and reality. Second, we show how sensemaking occurs when entrepreneurs build a causal map of the problem they wish to address and how social exchanges are crucial as entrepreneurs then refine that idea with other sensegivers. Finally, we extend scholarly understanding through explaining the ways in which sensemaking, sensegiving and sense receiving contribute to the decision of entrepreneurs to act and create a new venture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on human capital theory to assess the importance of formal education among graduate entrepreneurs. Using a sample of 4953 digital start-ups the paper evaluates the impact of start-up founding teams’ higher education on the probability of securing equity investment and subsequent exit for investors. The main findings are: (1), teams with a founder that has a technical education are less likely to remain self-financed and are more likely to secure equity investment and to exit, but the impact of technical education declines with higher level degrees, (2) teams with a founder that has doctoral level business education are less likely to remain self-financed and have a higher probability of securing equity investment, while undergraduate and postgraduate business education have no significant effect, and (3) teams with a founder that has an undergraduate general education (arts and humanities) are less likely to remain self-financed and are more likely to secure equity investment and exit while postgraduate and doctoral general education have no significant effect on securing equity investment and exit. The findings enhance our understanding of factors that influence digital start-ups achieving equity milestones by showing the heterogeneous influence of different types of higher education, and therefore human capital, on new ventures achieving equity milestones. The results suggest that researchers and policy-makers should extend their consideration of universities entrepreneurial activity to include the development of human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, the phenomenon of technology entrepreneurship has attracted the interest of researchers and policy makers due to its significant impact upon economic progress. Several authors define technology entrepreneurship as the interface of two well-established, but related fields-entrepreneurship and technological innovation. In this vein, technological opportunities can be recognized and exploited by individuals through new venture creation yet equally can be pursued by individuals or groups within existing public or private organizations. This special section provides a more fine grained understanding of technology entrepreneurship by considering interactions across these individual and organizational levels. We present three studies, empirically grounded within the specific and distinct policy contexts of Spain, Italy and the UK, that reveal new insights on the determinants of technology entrepreneurship. In this introductory paper, we consider the themes and contributions of these papers and provide an agenda for further research outlining a greater use of multi-level approaches to further our understanding of technology entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks are integral to the emergence and development of new ventures, but the temporal utility of networks is poorly understood. We consider the initial development of four university spin-offs and examine the formation and development of network ties to construct valuable entrepreneurial competencies. We develop a conceptual framework that explains how strong and weak network ties are strategically transformed in terms of strength and purpose depending on the type of competency sought and the business development need. We conclude that theoretical explanations of the new venture formation process need to incorporate not only network formation but also the role of network tie transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the management literature, tacit knowledge has been conceptualised in partial, divergent, and contradictory ways. This paper reconciles these different approaches by explaining how they address different aspects of the theory of tacit knowing developed through the seminal work of Michael Polanyi. To clarify Polanyi's work, we provide a more inclusive theoretical framework for scholars concerned with the creation and transfer of knowledge. Using this framework, we examine the implications for theory and practice of these different conceptualisations and suggest areas for future research. We conclude by proposing that new insights can be gained by reconsidering the concepts of knowing, tacit integration and indwelling where tacit knowing is developed by practical immersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By combining the strategic entrepreneurship perspective and resource orchestration theory we provide an integrated framework that explains the heterogeneity of growth across different types of university spin-offs (USOs). We show that appropriate resource accumulation, the bundling of resources to build competencies and the leveraging of those competencies into the market are all necessary but they also need to be synchronised with an appropriate growth strategy to realise sustainable growth. We discuss the differential resource needs at different stages of growth as USOs attempt to overcome critical junctures of entrepreneurial commitment and venture credibility. We explain the difficulties of accumulating an appropriate breadth of resources and competencies as they are contingent upon whether the USO should be aiming to sell their technology outright or whether they should be developing a product for a specific market opportunity. We conclude by proposing that universities and technology transfer offices should synchronise the depth of their organisational support to meet the growth contingencies of the USO. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The development of entrepreneurial intentions by academics remains a relatively unexplored area. This study investigates the transition from intentions to career destinations in a group of early career bioscientists following their participation in a business plan competition. Despite a significant proportion of academics stating entrepreneurial intentions, very few were seen to subsequently create new ventures. Through a longitudinal analysis distinct patterns of changing aspirations are observed as academics attempt to develop ventures within academe or leave to pursue industrial careers. Propositions are developed explaining how the use of social capital influences changing ambitions and destinations. We observe that weak ties are used to reveal the specific skills needed to realise entrepreneurial intentions. By contrast, strong ties are used to either reinforce entrepreneurial intentions or change career aspirations altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been an increase in research activity focused on the contribution of university spin-offs to economic competitiveness, yet the majority of the studies have considered the economic performance of universities or spin-offs in isolation. Such studies have cast some doubt on the extent to which spin-offs have generated expected performance benefits in terms of economic impact and have critiqued the role and capabilities of technology transfer offices in adding value to spin-off ventures. With a few exceptions, studies of academic entrepreneurship have tended to omit consideration of the role of the entrepreneur, and thereby neglected any economic contribution outside of spin-off venture creation. We propose that to better understand the economic impact of academic entrepreneurship, there is a need to explicitly recognize the academic entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial behavior across different contexts. First, we suggest that academic entrepreneurship can occur in a wider range of contexts than previously examined, necessitating a consideration of the mobility of academic entrepreneurs back and forth between academic and commercial settings. Second, there is a need to better understand the microfoundations, that is, the behavioral and cognitive processes associated with academic entrepreneurs, as they create and develop enterprises within academe or industry. Third, there is a need to examine the heterogeneity of all universities involved in academic entrepreneurship, specifically looking outside the atypical group of leading research universities and considering the significant variance in entrepreneurial culture between schools within specific universities. Fourth, we propose that the nature of policy toward knowledge transfer and academic entrepreneurship needs to be sensitive to the individual and the context. We argue that policy can have unintended consequences upon the entrepreneurial behavior of individuals due to the significant moderating effect of the entrepreneurial legacy of different contexts. Implications for policy and further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the UK considerable policy support has been provided to create multidisciplinary institutes that encourage academics to develop new knowledge for industry and societal problems. We consider four large traditional UK universities that have gained significant funding for such activities. We examine the changes in institutional structures necessary to enable universities to transform from single-discipline-based schools to multidisciplinary institutes. New incentives for working across schools, the cross-subsidy transfer of industry-funded research and teaching income, and senior role models are observed to enable the development of a multidisciplinary research capability. Yet, this capability is not easily sustained. It appears that for institutes to survive beyond the initial funding round, they regress towards traditional school activities of peer-reviewed research and teaching. We conclude that to transform academic behaviour, a fundamental shift in promotion procedures, which remain heavily weighted towards peer-reviewed journal publication within single disciplines, is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we employ resource-based and institutional theories to examine the current role of business schools in academic entrepreneurship. In particular, we seek to identify and understand the challenges to business schools contributing to the transfer of knowledge to enable academic entrepreneurship. Employing a case-based method, we present evidence from 42 interviews with technology transfer officers (TTOs), business school deans, business school entrepreneurship faculty and scientists in eight UK universities. Our empirical analysis is focused on analyzing the challenges arising from the links between business schools and three other principal stakeholders of academic entrepreneurship (i.e., the university management, TTOs and academics in science departments). The findings suggest that in addition to concerns about the nature of their human capital, the ability of business schools to fill knowledge gaps in the development of academic entrepreneurship is constrained by the institutional structures of universities which influence: the strategies of the university and the business school; links between business schools, TTOs and scientists; and process issues relating to differences in language and codes, goal differences, incentives and rewards, expertise differences and the content of interactions. We conclude that if business schools are to play a more prominent role in academic entrepreneurship there is a need to develop internal university processes and policies that promote rather than hinder internal knowledge flows between business schools, TTOs and science departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops theory relating to how differences in the human capital of academic entrepreneurs influence their ability to develop social capital that can address the barriers to venture development. We examine the development of social capital by three types of academic entrepreneurs with differing levels of entrepreneurship experience: nascent, novice, and habitual entrepreneurs. Using a longitudinal study, critical differences are observed between the structure, content, and governance of their social networks. We propose that entrepreneurs with prior business ownership experience have broader social networks and are more effective in developing network ties. Less experienced entrepreneurs likely encounter structural holes between their scientific research networks and industry networks. Support initiatives help attract industry partners for novice entrepreneurs from engineering and the material sciences but academics based within biological sciences encounter greater difficulties building such ties. Regardless of academic discipline, business ownership experience appears essential to learn to build relationships with experienced managers and potential equity investors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates a fellowship scheme aiming to overcome attitudinal and operational barriers towards university technology transfer. We propose barriers exist because of the focus of many academics exclusively within a peer review research network. We explore the case of the Medici Fellowship programme that was implemented in biomedical departments across five universities located in the midlands of England. Our evidence suggests that such fellowship programmes, through the retraining of academics, may have a positive impact on the commercialisation of research. In particular, the fellows, through the enhancement of their social and human capital, are able to act as agents of attitudinal change in their host departments and are seen to build bridges into external business networks that can provide early stage funding, market and legal information and help identify potential customers for nascent academic entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose--This study aims to understand how small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can build a dynamic capability for new-to-market product development. Design/methodology/approach--Five innovative and ambitious case firms were selected and studied longitudinally over the course of five years. Findings--Within this group distinct development processes are identified that enable them to satisfy the unmet needs of new customers using their current technologies. However, to sustain this activity managers need to empower cross-functional teams to evaluate new technologies with an ever-increasing number of pioneering partners. An ideal sequence is proposed for them to achieve this by systematising learning between projects and thereby reconfiguring their development processes to meet the changing needs of the market. Research limitations/implications--This method appears most suited to SMEs able to develop new-to-market products in conjunction with technologically discerning customers and suppliers. As such it may be less applicable outside the observed business-to-business markets. Originality/value--The five cases studied aptly illustrate the interplay of certain paths, positions and processes in terms of how they relate to new-to-market product development performance. The implication for researchers and managers is that consideration of all of these factors is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that it is important to devote greater attention to the study of entrepreneurship in technology transfer in the light of greater government attention, the growth in the phenomenon, the need to identify how wealth can be created from spin-outs, changes in the cultures of universities and differences with technological entrepreneurship in general. The paper summarizes the contributions made by the papers presented in the special issue in terms of their levels of analysis. At the spin-out level, issues are raised concerning identification of typologies of spin-out firms, the evolution of spin-outs and external resources. At the university level, issues concerning policies, internal resources and processes are discussed. An agenda for further research is elaborated which relates to the need to examine further levels of analysis: the academic entrepreneurs themselves and how they recognize opportunities and shape their ideas to meet the market; the nature of internal university environments, processes and resources; and the nature of the scientific discipline which may have implications for the process of creation and development of spin-out ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the relationship between strategic themes (Fuchs et al., California Management Review, 42(3), 118-147, 2000), competitive performance and the processes firms used to support their ambitions. The research was under- taken in a small group of manufacturing SMEs. All the firms sought to achieve growth via the introduction of new products. Their strategic themes provided an internal focus while at the same time presenting the market with a clear position statement. Three of the Fuchs et al. (2000) themes were identified which, when applied solely and supported by appropriate process capabilities, led to sustained competitive positions. However, firms that attempted to pursue two of these themes concurrently were seen to experience conflict and inconsistency of direction. This identification of themes within SMEs provides a framework for SME managers to articulate realistic ambitions against which they can evaluate the effectiveness of their capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports the product innovation activities of 30 British manufacturing SMEs, all with aggressive growth ambitions. Shows that ten of these companies meet their aims by repeatedly introducing innovative new products that open up new market niches, which they successfully exploit. This is seen to contrast with the remaining, larger group that performs less well by introducing incremental improvement products into their current markets only. A longitudinal study identifies managerial approaches typical to the more successful group. These include a multi-functional approach to decision making and the use of market and competitor analysis in strategic product planning. This is supported by effective cross company communication of decisions and plans. Concludes that this combination of approaches offers ambitious small firms a potentially powerful competitive advantage over their larger rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]