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Innovation is one of the key issues in any discussion about the competitiveness of companies in high wage countries such as Germany. It is now well understood that the German industrial SMEs must innovate to successfully compete with foreign businesses, particularly the ones from the emerging markets. Consequently, there is an urgent practical need of high calibre innovation performance, especially by the technology-oriented industrial German SMEs. These considerations lead to the researcher, who himself is the owner-manager of such an enterprise, to think about a new innovation paradigm, the open innovation approach, which could potentially compensate the natural resource constraint disadvantage of SMEs. It is well-known that the open innovation approach has been successfully used principally by the large multinational enterprises. However, in this research, the prospects of its fruitful use by the German industrial SMEs has been investigated. The literature review confirmed that such investigation has not taken place so for at either a scholarly or a practitioner level. This DBA research, therefore, undertook this task. First a thorough literature review was carried out which gave insights into the actual German economic situation, on the business success opportunities that the digitisation has opened up for the businesses as well as the findings of extant research on the open innovation approach. The review considered scholarly outputs, professional and scholarly books, studies of the open innovation approach and measurements systems to gauge the success potential of such an approach. The findings of this research and its recommendations are based on significant data collection and analysis which occurred in three stages. First in depth-semi structured interview of 5 German manufacturing SMEs that were known for their innovation performance were conducted. Then in major data collection exercise a questionnaire survey of 371 German manufacturing using a set of over 100 questions, exploratory information on all aspects of company level innovation management was obtained and then a first-hand experience of use of 7 relevant crowdsourcing platforms was conducted. Interview data was analysed using thematic analysis, quantitative questionnaire survey data was analysed use one sample ‘t' tests as well as regression analysis through IBM-SPSS and the crowdsourcing platforms information was analysed through a detailed SWOT analysis. The results of these three sets of data analyses were brought together to draw fresh insights and propose a new crowdsourcing platform which could potentially facilitate successful use of Open Innovation approach by the German manufacturing SMEs. It is hoped that the conclusions and recommendation of this DBA research effort would inform German government policies on digitisation as well as SMEs support as well as inform German SMEs to shape their own Open Innovation agenda.

The study of entrepreneurial intentions, in general and of ethnic and/or immigrant communities is a well-developed strand of entrepreneurship research and has a long history (Bates, 2011; Jones, Mascarenhas-Keyes, & Ram, 2012; Jones & Ram, 2013; Kloosterman, 2010; Lofstrom & Bates, 2007; Waldinger, Aldrich, & Ward, 1990). However, the research involving the Arab ethnic minority in Israel and its peripherality is significantly scarce (Mayer & Baumgartner, 2014; Schnell, Greenberg, Arnon, & Shamai, 2015). As a result, we lack understanding of the unique characteristics of peripheral enterprises and of the peripheral entrepreneurial environment in Israel (Schnell et al., 2015). More specifically, there is a lack of comprehensive research in Israel that examines and establishes the antecedents of entrepreneurial intentions of the Arab entrepreneur at the agent level and thus, further studies are required to understand the factors that influence the behaviour of such entrepreneurs (Schnell et al.,2015). Further, despite increased importance of the role of entrepreneurship in the global and local economy, there is a lack of research investigating the extent to which the globalization process affects the entrepreneurial intentions (Freeman, 2013; Soriano & Dobon, 2009). Drawing on previous international literature, and national literature that is primarily macroeconomically focused on the structural embeddedness of the Arab entrepreneurs, this study investigates entrepreneurial intentions1 of the Arab entrepreneurs as the agent both on a macro level (social context) and a micro level (individual characteristics). Further, it attempts to identify the entrepreneurs within GEM typology, namely, necessity vs. opportunity entrepreneurs, and any transitioning effects along this latitude. It also charts the development of the Arab minority in Israel as an ethnic economy and the transformation of entrepreneurial intentions of individuals from within this transitioning economy, in the backdrop of wider globalization trends of the past few decades. This research explores a unique context. It should be noted that the Arab minority in Israel is exceptional in the sense that it is comprised of natives in the minority. As natives invariably constitute a majority of populations in almost all parts of the world, literature on entrepreneurial motivation in native ethnic minorities is scarce, if not non-existent. This work examines if the constructs used in and the insights generated by the prior research on native, ethnic and migrant minorities apply also to a native ethnic minority, and in what ways they are similar and in which aspects they defer, especially considering that the Arab native ethnic minority in Israel is a collectivist society.

Entrepreneurship emerged from the discipline of economics before claiming its place as a discipline of its own, seven decades back. It is now widely recognised as a complex and dynamic process which is influenced by the socio-cultural context of an entrepreneur. At the same time, entrepreneurial learning is acknowledged as an experiential process relying on the social surrounding of an entrepreneur. There is substantial research on how entrepreneurs learn as well as how to teach entrepreneurship. There is also a general agreement among scholars that the entrepreneurship process includes certain key behaviours, attributes and skills which are amenable to teaching. However, the scholarly works on entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial learning continue to remain unaligned. There have been several calls in the literature for developing new pedagogical approaches to entrepreneurship while critiquing the prevalent methods such as developing business plans because of their inflexibilities and counterproductive influence on student learning on entrepreneurship courses in higher education. Considering the distinct nature of the entrepreneurial process, this qualitative research takes an interpretivist-constructivist stance to explore the possibility of incorporating social network learning into entrepreneurship education within higher education in the United Kingdom in an attempt to align the above two streams of extant literature. Data in this research comprises of participant observations at coworking spaces followed by semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship educators and students of entrepreneurship education. This triangulatory nature of data collection helped in coagulating the researcher’s understanding of the underlying processes, drawing insights from multiple perspectives. Data were subsequently analysed using an adapted approach of the Grounded Theory method. The main contribution of this research is to present a conceptual framework of entrepreneurship education, which mimics the learning process of entrepreneurs by having a constructivist approach to learning, incorporating a social networks approach in the curriculum. In addition, this research also makes methodological contributions as well as informs the relevant public policy. Finally, this research paves the way for further research on entrepreneurship education using observational data, longitudinal studies and novel methods such as analytical hierarchy process for deeper insights as well as generalisations.

This thesis discusses Academic Entrepreneurship within a prism of the Triple Helix model of innovation. It unravels how the socio-economic and political institutional logics of petroleum rentier states influence commercialization of findings of academic research in oil-rich regions. The thesis argues for a sociological approach to the study of entrepreneurship. Conceptualizing Academic Entrepreneurship as a social game, and the three members of the Triple Helix as players, it unravels the mechanisms of the relations within the Triple Helix as it plays out in oil-rich rentier regions. It focuses on the resource-rich West-African state of Nigeria as case. Using data from multiple sources, it unearths the various plays and combats; conflicts and tensions, struggles and negotiations, disagreements and agreements, between the three members of the Triple Helix. The central theme of the thesis is that the structural powers that condition academic entrepreneurship are governed by interdependencies between agency and context-specific socio-politico-economic institutional logics. This is in line with, yet goes beyond the prevalent claim that institutions impose rules that constitute constraints and enablers of agency. The thesis argues that agential actions are not mere rules-compliance, rather are outcomes of strategic and pragmatic calculations, emergent from agents' internalized externalities, and contingent upon agential held convictions about what works best within given institutional dynamics. Grounded on Bourdieu's sociology, and underpinned by Critical Realist philosophy, this thesis develops and offers a new conceptual framework applicable in entrepreneurship, organizational, and regional development research. Its findings highlight points of divergence of the key players in innovation and entrepreneurship, and offers policy-makers insights into what works, what doesn’t work and what may never work regarding entrepreneurship and innovation policy. It brings to the fore, the criticality of context-specific institutional considerations in entrepreneurship and innovation policy-making.