Search

PurposeDespite growing scholarly interest in academic entrepreneurship (AE) few studies have examined its non-commercial aspects and how it contributes to meeting grand societal challenges. One explanation for this may be the continuing focus of AE on intellectual property commercialization. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by uncovering how universities can contribute to promoting non-commercial forms of AE.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses the human capital theoretical lens to make its argument and applies it to data obtained from exploratory qualitative research (55 semi-structured interviews and nine focus groups) in the developing countries of Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador.FindingsUniversities can promote different forms of non-commercial AE even in the absence of sophisticated resources for innovation, through the stimulation of the specific human capital of the university community resulting from activities where they help others.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a general framework for advancing theory development in AE and its non-commercial forms, based on data obtained in uncharted territories for AE.

The accumulated knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship has provided a better understanding of its antecedents and consequences. Corporate entrepreneurship activities are strongly related to incremental or disruptive innovation processes. However, academic debates demand a novel conceptual framework to understand the gendered workforce’s contribution to corporate entrepreneurship initiatives worldwide. This study hypothesizes that a gendered workforce has similar capabilities (skills, ability to detect opportunities, and networks) to engage in corporate entrepreneurship. Therefore, any gender differences could be explained by the influence of country-level conditions (gender equality levels, culture, and social norms). We tested these hypotheses with a sample of 50,550 employees from 50 countries. Our results support these hypotheses extending the corporate entrepreneurship literature and provoking an interesting discussion to academics, managers, employees, and policymakers.

Growing importance has been attached to the concept of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EE) as productive structures that encompass complex sets of interaction driving economic agents’ competitive capabilities. Drawing from biomimetism, the EE approach dedicates attention to unraveling the mechanisms through which socioeconomic environments organize to introduce new knowledge and innovations in markets. Yet, while challenges associated with identifying the spatial scale of natural ecosystems have long been part of discussions in the field of ecology and evolutionary biology, and in economic geography, the geographic reach of EE remains largely uncharted in literature. Importantly, from a biomimetic standpoint, we know that ecosystems’ boundaries must be defined according to their formative processes, rather than reflect predefined political or administrative boundaries. In this study, we try to shed some light on these topics, underscoring the analytical and methodological challenges associated with the spatiality of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Thinking about entrepreneurial ecosystems as fixed analytical units attached to administrative boundaries will likely cause an inadequate analytical understanding of how entrepreneurship-oriented relationships are distributed in space.

The National Science and Technology Council (CONACYT) was established in 1970 by the Mexican government. CONACYT was formed to promote the scientific development and technological modernization of Mexico through developing high-level human resources, encouraging research projects, and disseminating scientific/technological information. In 2009, CONACYT launched the Innovation Stimulus Program (PEI) to foster enterprises’ innovation activities and to encourage collaboration on innovation activities among firms and between firms and public research institutes and higher education institutions. Based on an analysis of project data from the PEI program over the years 2009 through 2014, we found that large firms are more innovative than small firms. And, firms that are more innovative are those that had prior funded research, collaborated with universities in the funded research project, added new employees during the research project, and faced larger markets for their innovations. Plain English Summary Only a few studies have systematically compared publicly supported innovative behavior between groups of large and small firms within developing countries, and absent from this list is an analysis of Mexico. In this paper, we study research projects funded through Mexico’s Innovation Stimulus Program, and we find that large firms are more innovative than small firms. We also find that firms with previously funded research, that collaborated with universities in the funded research project, that added new employees during the research project, and that faced larger markets for their innovations are more innovative. Thus, the findings in this paper might provide an initial indication about those firms that will have a greater innovation-related response to the public funding to support their research.

This study investigates how geographical proximity with innovation ecosystems’ agents contribute to Schumpeterian firms’ innovation performance. By adopting the knowledge spillover theory, we propose and test a conceptual model using a firm-level data that merged information from multiple sources resulting in 3,074 observations during the period of 2002–2014. Our results contribute to the literature by extending three academic discussions: (a) the achievement of Schumpeterian firms’ innovation performance based on geographical proximity to innovation ecosystems’ agents, (b) the role of firm size, and (c) discussion on mechanisms of knowledge spillover for firm performance. We develop theoretical insights and managerial implications for Schumpeterian firms.

The low utilization of incubator resources has been subject to much academic attention within entrepreneurship research. This study explores how entrepreneurs’ overconfidence impacts the utilization of incubator resources and influences incubation performance. Based on interviews with 8 incubators and questionnaires from 184 entrepreneurs, the findings show a negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ overconfidence and the incubation performance of start-ups. This finding emerges in the context of incubation management through the fully mediating role of entrepreneurial learning. As a moderator, the contract control of the incubator weakens the negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ overconfidence and entrepreneurial learning. The microcosm of the incubator context allows the researchers to examine the internal agent interaction. This paper explores the related literature, presents the research study, discusses the findings and provides avenues for future scholarly research on this topic.

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.

The objective of this work is focused on improving the optimization ability of the cuckoo search algorithm (CS), and, for this reason, a comparison is made between type-1 and interval type-2 fuzzy logic to look for more promising results in the cuckoo search algorithm (CS), and to help performance, we dynamically adjust the alpha parameter. The idea is to enable CS in leaving the local optima, and then be able to reach the global optima. Currently, there are good results in improving the optimization of algorithms through intelligent fuzzy logic computing after finding the best adjustment parameters. The approach is based on finding the ideal rules with their respective linguistic variables to represent the real world as is perceived by humans. The membership functions that the fuzzy system uses are symmetrically defined for reducing the search space, and this symmetry is what makes the algorithm efficient. We plan to test the proposal in future works in the optimal design of control systems. In the present study, we use five benchmark mathematical functions with variation in the number of dimensions to validate the approach and perform the comparison of interval type-2 and type-1 fuzzy systems in parameter adaptation. For the dynamic adjustment of the parameters, we select the alpha parameter, and the values of Pa and Beta are defined based on the analysis of their behavior in previous works.