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The promotion of knowledge and technology transfer between universities and business is an important topic in the contemporary policy and literature. However, what has been largely neglected so far is the importance of trust and social capital for the latter. Based on a unique data set from a survey of Russian and Ukrainian researchers, we analyse the influence of social capital on the willingness of researchers to engage in industrial collaboration and the channels they use.

This study critically examines multiple levels of support from the current German start-up consulting landscape for refugees. Based on qualitative content analysis of 31 proposals submitted during a funding contest for refugee start-up consulting projects, the contribution reveals existing and envisaged structures for supporting refugees in founding their own company. Compared to recent literature for start-up advice for refugees and taking into consideration classical evaluation criteria of business plan contests and business incubators, common patterns are traced. The qualitative research approach also sheds light on existing support structures for migrant entrepreneurs. Here well-known resources, opportunities and hurdles of self-employed migrants have already been identified and these can be adapted in the future to the specific need of potential entrepreneurs who had to flee from their home country. Consequently, policy recommendations are highlighted.

As the developing nations grow and experience rapid institutional transformation, research has begun to investigate the roles of culture, cognition and institutional context on entrepreneurship and innovation. This chapter aims to advance the entrepreneurial cognition literature by juxtaposing entrepreneurial effectuation, domain-specific expertise and ambiguity. By conducting a qualitative study of Chinese high-tech domestic and returnee entrepreneurs, the authors propose a spectrum between causation and effectuation and argue that the entrepreneur’s perceived level of ambiguity may better explain differing logic orientations among entrepreneurs, contributing to our understanding of entrepreneurial cognition. The authors theorize that (1) individual actors and the level of institutional development jointly comprise the entrepreneur’s logic orientation; (2) the level of perceived ambiguity mediates the strategy adopted by high-tech entrepreneurs; (3) the entrepreneur’s logic orientation can be regarded as a continual spectrum from effectuation to causation. Finally, the logic orientation concept is applied to the context of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from a process perspective and the implications and fit of logic orientation with the stages of cross-border M&A are discussed.

This paper asks whether or not there is a hierarchy of entrepreneurship that goes beyond life cycle models of organizations to indicate a path to scalability. We posit a model illustrating a hierarchy that incorporates five progressive levels: solo, small, stable, salient and scalable. Embracing critical elements of any entrepreneurial venture -- the entrepreneur, the opportunity and available resources -- the model incorporates the key external variables: cultural, societal, legal and financial as well as internal attributes: confidence, skills, vision and leadership. We assume that global competitiveness motivates theentrepreneur to develop strategies to climb the hierarchy in order to achieve salience and scalability. The robustness of the model is then tested against recent entrepreneurship literature. Finally, we discuss the hypothesis the greater the scalability of a venture, the greater the job creation, which has significant policy implications.

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In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework underlining the entrepreneur's chosen strategy. We juxtapose different theoretical backgrounds and argue for a continuity spectrum from effectuation to causation. We argue that people are generally capable of both causal and effectual strategies and that to a small degree they choose individually and to a large degree are driven by their environment and cultural heritage to favor a particular strategy mix composed of differing proportions of effectuation and causation, pursuing one or the other (or a mix) depending on the decision-making domain in question.