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Over the past few decades, the promotion of entrepreneurship from universities has increased. Through this study, we seek to add to the growing body of research investigating the role of university-based incubators and accelerators by explaining how university resources are transformed into specialized entrepreneurial capabilities and how these capabilities contribute to successful entrepreneurial outcomes in the university context. We frame the primary research question in the study as: How do university-based incubators and accelerators create, enable, and leverage specialized entrepreneurial capabilities using university resources leading to sustained outcomes in academic entrepreneurship? The study bases the examination of the research question on the theories of resource-based view and dynamic capabilities. A descriptive multiple case study method is used to analyze incubators and accelerators located in two universities in India and their linked actors using a total of 30 interviews. The study contributes to theory development by explaining how these entities develop sensing, seizing, and transforming capabilities in the university entrepreneurship environment, thereby demonstrating the application of the dynamic capabilities framework in the academic entrepreneurship context.

The electric vehicle industry is staggering along an arduous path to dominant design and subsequent mass-market reach. We examine technology-specific factors that influence the emergence of a dominant design and posit that the technologies most central to technological and regional innovation are also those furthest away from establishing a dominant design. We find support for our hypothesized model in a panel data analysis of 2958 electric vehicle patents representing the development of 72 technologies over ten years. These technologies are even less likely to have a dominant design when they are complex, i.e., they have many components or interactions. However, for technologies with high innovation performance, the impact of complexity is inverted. Then, technological centrality, i.e., centrality in the technology system, paired with complexity make technologies more likely to converge toward a dominant design. Conversely, technologies with local centrality in a specific region, are more convergent and less complex. These serial interrelations among the antecedents of dominant design provide a more detailed understanding of market-based standardization than previously available. On a practical level, more innovation reduces the barriers generated by complexity. Thus, joint industry-level efforts may be useful to overcome persistent hurdles in the technology life cycle, such as those currently experienced by the electric vehicle industry.

In 2023, several progress reports were published to take stock of the mid-way progress toward the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda. The results outlined in these reports are distressing: the assessment of the 140 targets under the SDGs shows that “only about 12% are on track; close to half, though showing progress, are moderately or severely off track, and some 30% have either seen no movement or regressed below the 2015 baseline” [United Nations, 2023]. This raises important questions: Are we doing enough to address the societal challenges we face? Have we adopted the suitable approaches, methods, and tools? Are there new approaches we can follow?

This article aims to understand the influence of strategic posture of a firm on its decision-making orientation related to competitors and partners, and evaluates if such decision-making orientation of firms mediate the relationship between a firm's strategic posture and digitalization. The article uses partial least squares based structural equation modeling technique on primary data from 100 enterprises belonging to manufacturing and electronics sector operating from India. Based on the analysis, the article empirically establishes the linkage between a firm's strategic posture and its decision-making preferences in the contexts related to engaging with competitors and partners, taking digitalization as context. Next, it extends available knowledge on firms’ decision-making literature by establishing that a firm's decision-making orientation related to its competitors and partners has direct influence on its degree of digitalization. Finally, it empirically deduces that in the context of digitalization of firms, market-based analysis is the dominant decision-making paradigm as against obtaining stakeholder partnerships or precommitments.

The dominant design life cycle shows that standardization leads to stability and increased technology development. However, the breakneck speed of innovation means standards now require more frequent renewal. Therefore, this article conceptualizes standard inertia to include the factors impeding the emergence of a new standard. New standards must overcome the standard inertia generated by accumulated investments in knowledge, capabilities, and other resources, including identity and legitimacy. Multinational and small and medium-sized enterprises face complementary obstacles, and standard inertia is, thus, an ecosystem-level mechanism. Dominant designs may embed subsets of underlying dominant designs, meaning the emergence of a new design may overthrow an entire technology ecosystem. Therefore, inertial factors protecting the prior design also emanate from all ecosystem levels. Ecosystem platforms may consequently enable new forms of interaction required to break established patterns.

The arrival of electric vehicles to the mass market is hindered by lacking standardization of components and solutions. Standardization is especially important because of this technology's environmental and social impact. However, it is also particularly complex due to the interrelated technologies and actors concerned. Hence, in this article, we examine opportunities and challenges related to electric vehicle standardization, and derive a strategic framework based on these insights. We identify barriers related to automobile and mobility-as-a-service standardization committees, the struggles for dominant charging infrastructures of Tesla, BMW, and NIO, and the governmental regulation and incentives implemented in Norway, Germany, China, and the US. We find that a sequential shift of focus in standardization from engines to batteries to mobility adds complexity and continuity to the technology lifecycle. Depending on the standardization phase, firms are advised to collaborate, compete, or comply with standards. We also highlight inertia in this industry, which is a key component of established dominant designs. The struggle of incumbents with overcoming inertia leads to new dynamics and business opportunities in the final block of our outlook for this industry.