Search results for "innovation"

The performance of entrepreneurial small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises

2012

Innovation is an important driver of economic growth for it leads to new products and services, enhanced quality, and lower prices. In an increasingly competitive global market, innovation turns out to be essential to secure a viable competitive position. Although there is no perfect correspondence between accounting intangible assets and innovation activities, the association between these two concepts is close enough to take investment in intangible assets as a proxy for entrepreneurship and innovation. To identify differences between innovative and non‐innovative small and medium enterprises in the service industry, both descriptive and statistical analyses are performed on financial dat…

Can business model innovation help SMEs in the food and beverage industry to respond to crises? Findings from a Swiss brewery during COVID-19

2021

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how different business model innovations (BMIs) help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the food and beverage industry to navigate turbulent and uncertain environments such as the coronavirus economic crisis (COVID-19).Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts an in-depth case study approach and uses a dynamic business modeling (DBM) approach to analyze how a pioneer craft brewery in Switzerland implemented innovative actions undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic.FindingsThe paper offers a novel framework describing three processes helping SMEs to implement innovations in their business model (BM) to respond in an effective way to cr…

An overview of ecopreneurship, eco-innovation, and the ecological sector

2019

Given the current trend toward a more sustainable and environmentally-friendly economy, the overlap between entrepreneurship and sustainability has become a key research area. Part of this trend is the emergence of ecopreneurial businesses. These businesses are pioneers in using innovation to achieve sustainable growth by exploiting market opportunities. This article presents an overview of the concepts of ecopreneurship, eco-innovation, and the ecological sector. A rigorous review of the literature in this area is presented. The results of this review show the key values and principles that are central to this new stream of research and shed light on opportunities for further research. The…

Effects of network market orientation on new ventures' international performance

2013

By combining international entrepreneurship and marketing aspects, this work attempts to emphasise the importance of relational knowledge in international new ventures by studying the influence of network market orientation on the international results obtained by these firms. The results obtained in the comparison with the proposed structural equations model confirm that network market orientation is a determining factor for firms to achieve better international results. This influence is observed both directly and indirectly with the mediating effect on the differentiation– and cost–based competitive advantages developed by INVs.

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

2020

Chapter 1: Entrepreneurship as a social and economic process.- Chapter 2: The Entrepreneur.- Chapter 3: The entrepreneurial process.- Chapter 4: Intrapreneurship.- Chapter 5: Innovation in small firms.- Chapter 6: Adoption and diffusion of innovation.- Chapter 7: Planning, business models and strategy.- Chapter 8: Team building, company leadership and strategic alliances.- Chapter 9: Financing the venture.- Chapter 10: Intellectual property management.- Chapter 11: Risk management and innovation.- Chapter 12: Disruptive innovations and the commercialisation of technology.- Chapter 13: Social entrepreneurship and cooperative enterprise.

Beyond the “ivory tower”. Comparing academic and non-academic knowledge on social entrepreneurship

2021

The increasing relevance of societal challenges has recently brought social entrepreneurship to the fore due to its capacity to leverage entrepreneurial processes to achieve social value while ensuring profits. In this study, we apply an experimental research method to analyse the concept of social entrepreneurship comprehensively. More specifically, we develop bibliometric analysis and web crawling techniques to gather information related to social entrepreneurship from Scopus and Wikipedia. We conduct a comparative network analysis of social entrepreneurship’s conceptual structure at academic and non-academic levels. This analysis has been performed considering scientific articles’ keywor…

Workbook for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

2020

The relationship between entrepreneurship, innovation and growth in Italy

2019

This chapter considers innovation driven by academic entrepreneurship a strategic lever that can accelerate the development of weaker local economies especially in Southern Italy. The analysis of this form of entrepreneurship follows multidimensional approach of the “strategic entrepreneurship” to capture possible correlations between the single analysis approaches widespread in the literature (teleological, psychological, environmental and relational). The chapter intends to launch a reflection on the role of the University inside two particular innovation ecosystems, science and technology parks and research spin-offs. In this way the study of the entrepreneurial phenomenon will explore t…

Board of director attributes: effects on financial performance in SMEs

2021

This paper analyses the relationship between board of director (BoD) attributes and financial performance in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Although SMEs are the backbone of world economies, most studies on this relationship focused on large companies and did not consider many typical or recommended processes and activities carried out by SME BoDs. We monitored a set of variables related to BoD attributes such as composition, characteristics, structure and processes for 184 Italian SMEs along with their financials over a 4-year period (2014–2017). We controlled for enterprise-specific characteristics such as annual sales growth, assets value, sales turnover, leverage, com pany s…

Green entrepreneurship and SME performance: the moderating effect of firm age

2021

AbstractGreen entrepreneurship has been increasing with growing attention to environment protection by a variety of stakeholders. Green innovation, as the essence of green entrepreneurship, has attracted a broad range of scholarly attention with yet inconclusive findings regarding its effect on firm performance. According to our analyses of 1667 firms listed on SME board and GEM in China during the period from 2010 to 2019, we find interesting results regarding the type of green innovation involved and the moderating effect of firm age on the link between green innovation and SME performance. More precisely, we find green utility-model innovation positively influences firm performance for S…