Digital sport entrepreneurial ecosystems

The entrepreneurial ecosystems literature has increasingly explored network relationships between different stakeholders, as well as the role of context. This article addresses the challenge of including a sport context in the entrepreneurial ecosystem literature thereby contributing to the sport entrepreneurship literature by bringing insights from entrepreneurship ecosystem research. In‐depth interviews of football stakeholders in the sport entrepreneurship ecosystem are conducted in terms of understanding the emergence of digital sport start‐ups. The issues raised help explore the changing nature of digital entrepreneurial ecosystems to take into account new sport technological advances. Mixed embeddedness theory is used as the conceptual foundation to understand sport digital entrepreneurial ecosystems. Key management practices are identified in terms of sport start‐ups participating in entrepreneurial ecosystems. The article concludes by making suggestions for future research.     

Blockchain tokens and the potential democratization of entrepreneurship and innovation

Over the past few years, Bitcoin has emerged as the first decentralized, global currency. The rise of Bitcoin has brought attention not only to digital currencies but also to the underlying technology empowering digital currencies: blockchain technology. A blockchain is a distributed ledger that records and secures transactions in a peer-to-peer network. Besides empowering digital currencies, blockchain technology has given innovators the capability of creating digital tokens to represent scarce assets, potentially reshaping the landscape of entrepreneurship and innovation. Blockchain tokens may democratize (1) entrepreneurship by giving entrepreneurs new ways to raise funds and engage stakeholders, and (2) innovation by giving innovators a new way to develop, deploy, and diffuse decentralized applications. Blockchain technology and tokens have sparked a new wave of innovation, which may start to revolutionize entrepreneurship and innovation.     

Movements, bandwagons, and clones: Industry evolution and the entrepreneurial process

Entrepreneurship research has paid insufficient attention to the context in which new businesses are started. Consequently, efforts to identify factors that consistently lead to entrepreneurial success have failed. This is because what works in one context will not necessarily work in another. Even worse, factors that lead to success in one context may lead to failure in another.This article addresses this problem by drawing from the concept of industry evolution to identify three broad but distinct organizing contexts—emerging, growth, and mature industries—and demonstrating how each context presents a different set of entrepreneurial challenges. An industry is defined not as a group of firms producing close substitutes, but instead, as a group of firms of the same organizational form. Industry evolution is understood therefore as the diffusion of an organizational form, with emerging, growth, and mature stages corresponding to the creation, exploitation and erosion of competitive advantage. Defining an industry in this manner makes it possible to overcome the problem of shifting industry boundaries and enables us to distinguish between entrepreneurial activities that shake up existing industries by creating new and competing organizational forms and entrepreneurial activities that replicate well-known organizational forms and drive an industry toward equilibrium. It also enables us to draw from the work of industrial organization economics, strategy, and population ecology.Entrepreneurship is defined as the creation of new organizations and is viewed as a context-dependent social process. New organizations are enacted as critical stakeholders change their behaviors in ways that allow the organization to emerge. The process is successful when the short-term existence of a new organization is no longer at risk. A typological theory of entrepreneurial success is developed by examining how the fit between context and four other critical dimensions cause successful foundings. The theory is multiplicative and probabilistic. It is multiplicative in that all dimensions need to fit for a founding to be successful. Poor fit in any one area can lead to failure. It is probabilistic in that the better the overall fit, the better the odds of success.In addition to context, the dimensions we examine are entrepreneurial networks, entrepreneurial confidence-building behaviors, the motivation of stakeholders, and organizational structures and strategies. In terms of entrepreneurial networks, we examine whether entrepreneurs have weak-tie or strongtie networks, and whether their networks are homogeneous or include subgroups that are unrelated. In terms of confidence-building behaviors, we explore the use of informal (e.g., repeated personal interaction) versus formal (e.g., contracts) mechanisms. With respect to stakeholder motivations, we ask whether stakeholders are driven by social or instrumental motivations. In terms of structure and strategy, we consider two issues. First, we explore whether the emerging organization is market or hierarchy based, and we consider the extent to which the organization is innovative versus imitative. We argue that these various dimensions come together in three logical configurations, that we label movements, bandwagons, and clones.EMERGING INDUSTRY ORGANIZING: MOVEMENTSMovements are the organizing processes through which new organizational forms are created. Pioneers of new forms of organizations have unique personal networks that enable them to see the potential of bringing the factors of production together in new combinations. They have strong ties to two or more nonoverlapping networks. To succeed, they must overcome problems associated with lack of legitimacy. Theentrepreneur is joined by highly committed stakeholders who are motivated by social factors. Belief in the venture's success is achieved through informal confidence building, such as incremental personal exchange and third-party reputation. In this manner, stakeholders develop personal familiarity with the form and make positive assessments about the entrepreneur's competence and trustworthiness. The organizing structure is market based with participant commitments being secured through flexible, cooperative agreements. The strategic emphasis is on innovation and experimentation. The belief in the importance and viability of the new organizational form serves as a loose ideology for controlling and coordinating the actions of participants.GROWTH INDUSTRY ORGANIZING: BANDWAGONSBandwagons are organizing processes that seek to exploit the potential of a newly legitimated form. The strategic challenge at this stage is to prosper newly legitimated form. The strategic challenge at this stage is to prospeamidst rapid growth and change. The successful entrepreneur has an extensive network of high status individuals that can be tapped to quickly mobilize resources within a narrow window of opportunity. Stakeholders are motivated less by social factors, than by a desire to secure the benefits of being early movers. Formal confidence-building mechanisms dominate. In an effort to achieve efficiencies, develop sources of competitive advantage, and preempt the competition, more value-chain activities are developed in house. The strategic posture remains entrepreneurial; however, more emphasis is placed on following the example of other firms.MATURE INDUSTRY ORGANIZING: CLONESClones are the organizing processes that replicate existing forms and incorporate all that has been learned about a given industry and type of business. Strong competition along with stable demand and technology make it difficult to find a source of competitive advantage in a mature industry. At this stage, the successful founder is someone with extensive industry knowledge and contacts who is capable of extracting operating efficiencies and/or identifying some underserved market segment. Expected returns are modest and stakeholders need to be motivated partly by social factors. However, the large amount of information now available about the form and the market itserves enables stakeholders to base their participation decisions on a rational assessment of expected future benefits. Given increased experience with the form, the relationships between the organization and its stakeholders are more predictable and as a consequence, subject to greater formalization. Models exist showing how to structure theserelationships, facilitating greater use of more specific contracts and guarantees. With tight margins and the need for efficiency, greater use is made of hierarchy in an attempt to manage costs. These same highly competitive conditions also make mistakes very expensive. The organization needs to draw upon the knowledge that others have learned about the form. Consequently, it adopts a more conservative strategic posture and is less likely to deviate from established practice.IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCHIf we are ever to understand what leads to entrepreneurial success, we must pay more attention to the context in which organizing occurs. Our typology suggests that fundamentally different processes may be at work at different stages of industry evolution. In addition to empirically testing our theory, an opportunity exists to reexamine the existing entrepreneurship literature through a new conceptual lens, asking how our interpretation of the research would differ if context was considered explicitly. Our theory also has the potential to inform questions about the role of organizational foundings in the diffusion of competitive advantage and to examine the impact of.founding conditions on long-term strategic adaptation.     

Organizing for Society: A Typology of Social Entrepreneuring Models

In this article, we use content and cluster analysis on a global sample of 200 social entrepreneurial organizations to develop a typology of social entrepreneuring models. This typology is based on four possible forms of capital that can be leveraged: social, economic, human, and political. Furthermore, our findings reveal that these four social entrepreneuring models are associated with distinct logics of justification that may explain different ways of organizing across organizations. This study contributes to understanding social entrepreneurship as a field of practice and it describes avenues for theorizing about the different organizational approaches adopted by social entrepreneurs.     

Civic entrepreneurial ecosystems: Smart city emergence in Kansas City

Embedded between the broader fields of social and digital entrepreneurship, the concept of ‘smart cities’ can be conceptualized as a domain that is currently pre-paradigmatic—that is, one in which multiple yet unaligned models exist, marked by the absence of a single dominant one. Despite such shortcomings, there is a reflective similarity across ecosystems as the various players attempt to converge on a common understanding of the term smart city. The common objective of smart city implementation is to spark economic growth and social development, facilitated by collaborative dialogue and innovations in technology. We integrate theoretical lenses to explore the roles played by ecosystem actors, stakeholders, and socioeconomic and political agents in creating economic value and solving societal problems—particularly highlighting opportunities and challenges to bottom-up innovation from local entrepreneurs.     

Measuring emergence in the dynamics of new venture creation

Modeling the dynamics of nascent entrepreneurship provides insight into how organizations are created. In order to study this complex phenomenon we develop a longitudinal case study and analyze it with respect to three modes of organizing: vision, strategic organizing, and tactical organizing. Multiple sources of data are used to identify changes within and across these three modes. Using longitudinal content analysis and other complexity science methods, we found a nearly simultaneous shift in all three modes, indicating a punctuation event. We define this punctuation as an “emergence event,” and provide a process model of organizational emergence showing that a shift in tactical organizing generated a shift in strategic organizing, which resulted in a shift in the vision (identity) of the firm. We conclude with some theoretical implications of our analysis.     

The digital entrepreneurial ecosystem

A significant gap exists in the conceptualization of entrepreneurship in the digital age. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for studying entrepreneurship in the digital age by integrating two well-established concepts: the digital ecosystem and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The integration of these two ecosystems helps us better understand the interactions of agents and users that incorporate insights of consumers’ individual and social behavior. The Digital Entrepreneurial Ecosystem framework consists of four concepts: digital infrastructure governance, digital user citizenship, digital entrepreneurship, and digital marketplace. The paper develops propositions for each of the four concepts and provides a theoretical framework of multisided platforms to better understand the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem. Finally, it outlines a new research agenda to fill the gap in our understanding of entrepreneurship in the digital age.     

Customer-based execution strategy in a global digital economy

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are continuing to invest more in expanding into new markets around the world. These firms are faced with determining the optimal go-to-market strategy in these heterogeneous new markets to attract and retain profitable customers. This paper provides an organizing framework to help firms develop profitable customer-level strategies across countries in the digital environment. We start by providing a summary of the marketing literature on a customer-based execution strategy. Next, we discuss how the evolving digital landscape is affecting firms’ relationships with customers and describe some of the current digital product and process innovations in the marketplace. We discuss boundary conditions for how these digital product and process innovations might affect profitable customer strategies in a global context. In addition, we discuss implementation challenges that MNCs will likely face in deploying these customer-level strategies and other stakeholders (outside of customers) that will likely play a role in the execution of these customer-level strategies. Finally, we summarize set of research questions to guide future research on customer-level strategies in a global digital context.     

Bringing the elephant into the room? Enacting conflict in collective prosocial organizing

Cross-sector partnerships have the capacity to bring together partners from very different backgrounds and circumstances toward collective prosocial efforts. We conducted a longitudinal inductive field study of eight cross-sector partnerships formed as new ventures addressing a variety of fundamental social challenges in the context of deep inequality in post-Apartheid South Africa. This allowed us to develop theory and a process model that explains how some partnerships are able to achieve collective prosocial efforts while others engage in only one-sided efforts or become inactive. The key differences hinge on processes of enacting or failing to enact conflicting material interests among relevant stakeholders. Our results have implications for the inclusion of material interests in theories of cross-sector partnering and for our understanding of entrepreneurship under conditions of inequality. The theory we develop provides a platform for future research on collective prosocial organizing in the contexts that need it most.     

A process model of academic entrepreneurship

Innovations stemming from research conducted on university campuses are a growing source for the ideas and core technologies that drive entrepreneurial endeavors. This trend has led to development of the term academic entrepreneurship, which refers to the efforts and activities that universities and their industry partners undertake in hopes of commercializing the outcomes of faculty research. Because it is a relatively new phenomenon, the process of academic entrepreneurship has not been as well articulated as one might hope. As such, the objective of this article is to draw on a range of academic entrepreneurship literature to develop a multi-stage process model of academic entrepreneurship. This model is intended to guide potential stakeholders through the application of academic entrepreneurship, with a focus on improving the odds of success. The advantage of this approach is identification of the activities, actors, and key success factors associated with each stage of the academic entrepreneurship process. We conclude our discussion by highlighting the benefits of engaging in academic entrepreneurship for a variety of potential stakeholders.