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The nurturing of an entrepreneurial university is essential since it creates an important place to teach the key themes of entrepreneurship. This paper provides a literature review and discusses the various definitions of the entrepreneurial university and its development factors. This paper uses [Kearnay’s (1999). Enterprising Ways to Teach and Learn, a series of books, Enterprise Principles. Enterprise Design Associates. Tasmania, Australia: North Hobart] pedagogical approach on the development of the entrepreneurial university to create an empirical survey administered to 250 university professors in Tunisia. The results of this study illustrate that Kearnay’s pedagogical approach [Kearney, P (1999). Enterprising Ways to Teach and Learn, a series of books, Enterprise Principles. Enterprise Design Associates. Tasmania, Australia: North Hobart] (responsive, experiential, reflective, and cooperative pedagogy) positively influences the development of the entrepreneurial university. We conclude with an original teaching method framework to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit in university students to facilitate an entrepreneurial university.

In 2013, Germany, a world leading industrialized nation published its Industry 4.0 strategic plan. The term Industry 4.0 has been referred to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this paper, in the era of Industry 4.0, we studied the importance of three types of legitimacy related to the different stages of new ventures. A framework was designed using the concept of guanxi to better understand its relationship to the corporate life cycle. In this study, two different kinds of guanxi, business and political, affect the legitimacy of a company.

In the era of Industry 4.0 and Made in China 2025 initiatives, this research is focused on exploring how entrepreneurial decision‐making logics contribute to opportunity identification by combining effectuation theory and knowledge‐based theory under high uncertainty through strategic knowledge integration in emerging economies, such as the Chinese economy. Empirical data were collected from 196 entrepreneurs and top executives in Chinese high‐tech new ventures using an interview survey. An established mediation model's assessment approach was used to test hypotheses through multivariate linear regression analyses. The analysis results show that both effectuation and causation have positive effects on opportunity identification. Also, emergent/planned knowledge integration plays a fully mediating role in the relationship between effectuation/causation and opportunity identification. This research contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence to explain the problem of entrepreneurial opportunity identification under high uncertainty through the lens of effectuation theory. It facilitates the development of effectuation theory and enriches the literature on strategic knowledge integration. Moreover, our findings have important managerial implications for high‐tech new ventures to effectively recognize new opportunities in the context of emerging economies.

PurposeEnhancing consumer engagement in e-commerce live streaming is critical for e-commerce operators to build relationships and create consumer loyalty. Using the stimulus–organism–response model and theories from relationship marketing, the authors develop and test an integrative conceptual framework that combines various relational bonds, affective commitment, and consumer engagement.Design/methodology/approachUsing 327 valid responses from consumers of Taobao Live, the authors employed the software Mplus7.0 to evaluate the measurement model and the structural model.FindingsThe results empirically demonstrate that social and structural bonds positively affect consumer engagement directly and indirectly via affective commitment, while financial bonds have only an indirect effect via affective commitment on consumer engagement.Practical implicationsThe findings provide useful insights for e-commerce operators, who should invest in establishing relational bonds and stimulating affective commitment to improve consumer engagement.Originality/valueThis study adds to e-commerce research by being one of the first empirical studies on e-commerce live streaming, extends the marketing literature by integrating different relational bonds as antecedents of consumer engagement from the relational perspective, and enriches the affective commitment literature by distinguishing commitment to the online marketplace from commitment to the broadcaster.

In this paper, we address a multi-period multi-product acquisition planning problem where the retailer faces uncertain demand for the products and the suppliers provide all-unit quantity discounts. The problem is an extension of single period constrained newsvendor problem, which considers both the supplier discounts and multiple periods. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming model and develop a Lagrangian relaxation based approach. Efficient solution procedures are presented to solve the decomposed sub-problems that are based on the properties of the problem. Computational results show that the Lagrangian method can quickly obtain very good solutions.

In recent years, as a novel financing mechanism, crowdfunding has gained popularity worldwide. In China, Crowdfunding started in 2011 and has experienced extremely fast growth since then. Several studies have identified success factors for crowdfunding. While these studies help infer the dynamics of crowdfunding, such dynamics have not been sufficiently examined, particularly by large-scale empirical studies. In addition, the relationship between crowdfunding market characteristics and project funding success remains fuzzy. In this research, we first empirically assessed the effect of crowdfunding success factors using a large sample (N = 5128) collected from Taobao.com , a leading crowdfunding platform in China. Built upon these factors, we conducted a multi-period, multi-party simulation study that evaluate crowdfund raisers’ project positioning decisions and investors’ project funding decision in a massive market. In the simulation study, we varied market characteristics such as the number of projects, number of investors per project, entrepreneurs’ moral risk, and ratio of community over financial benefits, to observe their effect on participants’ decisions and consequently, project funding success rate. Results reveal that dynamics of a crowdfunding market are rather complex. These insights contribute to a more in-depth theoretical understanding of crowdfunding, as well as provide useful guidance for crowdfund raisers, investors, and administrators.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a simulation-based value function (VF) that combines multiple key performance indicators (KPIs) into a unified Sigma rating (SR) for system-level performance assessment and improvement. Design/methodology/approach Simulation is used as a platform for assessing the multiple KPIs at the system level. A simple additive VF is formed to combine the KPIs into a unified SR using the analytical hierarchy process and the entropy method. Value mapping is utilized to resolve the conflict among KPIs and generate a unified value. These methods are integrated into the standard Six Sigma define-measure-analyze-improve-control (DMAIC) process. Findings Simulation results provided the Six Sigma DMAIC process with system-level performance measurement and analysis based on multiple KPIs. The developed VF successfully generated unified SRs that were used to assess various performance improvement plans. Research limitations/implications The accuracy and credibility of the results obtained from using the proposed VF are highly dependent on the availability of pertinent data and the accuracy of the developed simulation model. Practical implications The proposed approach provides Six Sigma practitioners and performance mangers with a mechanism to assess and improve the performance of production and service system based on multiple KPIs when conducting Six Sigma studies. Originality/value This paper contributes to the previous research by handling multiple KPIs in Six Sigma studies conducted at the system level using simulation and VF. The research also provides guidelines for using the different methods of weights assessment to form the VF within the DMAIC process.

With the aims of achieving the distributed, collaborative and automated design & manufacturing workflow, the concept of Industry 4.0 and its associated implementations have been effectively taken a...

As online social networks are reshaping the way users share their daily experiences, and the way business practitioners manage their marketing activities, crowdturfing has been emerging as a potential threat that concerns many users. If no proper measures are taken, it may result in a crisis, such as public opinion being misled. In general, crowdturfing refers to coordinated suspicious online behaviors, such as hiring online posters to propagandize online comments with mendacious contents or to spread gossip about their competitors. Through crowdturfing, the stakeholders can achieve their expected goals of manipulating the public opinion, which would further bring negative effects on both the Internet users and society.

To operate an in-orbit spacecraft, the spacecraft status has to be monitored autonomously by collecting and analysing real-time data, and then detecting abnormities and malfunctions of system components. To develop an information system for spacecraft state detection, we investigate the feasibility of using ontology-based artificial intelligence in the system development. We propose a new modelling technique based on the semantic web, agent, scenarios and ontologies model. In modelling, the subjects of astronautics fields are classified, corresponding agents and scenarios are defined, and they are connected by the semantic web to analyse data and detect failures. We introduce the modelling methodologies and the resulted framework of the status detection information system in this paper. We discuss system components as well as their interactions in details. The system has been prototyped and tested to illustrate its feasibility and effectiveness. The proposed modelling technique is generic which can be extended and applied to the system development of other large-scale and complex information systems.