Do cultural and creative entrepreneurs make affectively driven decisions? Not when they evaluate their opportunities

Our research studies the influence of positive affect on entrepreneurs' evaluations of opportunities (i.e. novelty assessments and entrepreneurial selection) as well as how this influence may be different for entrepreneurs belonging to cultural and creative industries. Drawing on arguments on the role of affect in cognition and considering the particular situational and individual-level factors of entrepreneurship in cultural and creative industries, we hypothesize that positive affect influences entrepreneurs' opportunity evaluation. We also hypothesize that this effect of positive affect is barely present for cultural and creative entrepreneurs. We test our hypotheses in a sample of nascent entrepreneurs who took part in entrepreneurship training programmes in six incubators in Spain, who we asked to evaluate their own opportunity. Our results show that positive affect positively impacts the perceived novelty and entrepreneurial selection of non-creative entrepreneurs though this impact is limited for cultural and creative entrepreneurs.     

ICT‐supported pedagogical policies and practices in South Africa and Chile: emerging economies and realities

South Africa participated in all three of the Second International Technology in Education Study (SITES). In the first international study, South Africa was the only developing country, and therefore, stark contrasts were found in the international study between South Africa and the other participating countries. Chile participated in the SITES 2006 as one of a few developing countries making the comparison with South Africa possible. Despite similarities in their contexts and economies, their approach to information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education appears to differ. This difference raised questions about differences in policies and their implementation at school level. This research conducted in South Africa found that the Chilean strategy for developing and implementing their ICT in education appear to be very different with regard to its design, the organization, the strategies adopted, the resources used and, most importantly, their approach to teacher development for implementing ICT. A number of lessons are revealed for the South African policymakers and others from similar developing contexts.     

Correlation and hierarchies in financial markets

As an emerging financial market, the trading value of carbon emission trading market has definitely increased in recent years. The carbon emission is not only trading in carbon emitters but also has become an important investment target. To determine the mechanism of this growing market, we analyzed the EU allowances (EUA) price series in European Climate Exchange (ECX) that is the leading European emissions futures market. As other financial market, the absolute value of price change (volatility) in carbon emission trading market also shows long-term power-law correlations. Our analysis shows that definite cross correlations exist between EUA and many other markets. These cross correlations exist in wild-range fields, stock market index, futures of crude, sugar, cocoa, etc., suggesting that in this new carbon emission trading market the speculation behavior had already become a main factor that can affect the price change.     

The emancipatory potential of digital entrepreneurship: A study of financial technology-driven inclusive growth

Digital entrepreneurship possesses immense societal implications beyond its commercial significance. Yet our knowledge of the emancipatory potential of digital entrepreneurship remains limited because few studies have gone beyond the conventional emphasis on profits and wealth creation. Drawing on the emancipatory perspective that views entrepreneurship as change creation through the removal of constraints, this article examines how emancipation can occur through the actions of digital entrepreneurs. Using an empirical investigation of entrepreneurial endeavours set against disadvantaged communities in Indonesia, we uncover constraints facing a developing economy and the role of digital technologies in ameliorating them. Through extensive fieldwork and in-depth case study analyses, we identify constraining societal norms and restrictive practices, as well as the three forms of digital enablement - to emulate services, aggregate capital and equalise opportunities – necessary for the enactment of digitally enabled emancipation. We present a framework to illustrate the enactment of emancipatory digital entrepreneurship for the inclusive development of businesses and communities.     

The South African Human Language Technology Audit

Human language technology (HLT) has been identified as a priority area by the South African government. However, despite efforts by government and the research and development (R&D) community, South Africa has not yet been able to maximise the opportunities of HLT and create a thriving HLT industry. One of the key challenges is the fact that there is insufficient codified knowledge about the current South African HLT components, their attributes and existing relationships. Hence a technology audit was conducted for the South African HLT landscape, to create a systematic and detailed inventory of the status of the HLT components across the eleven official languages. Based on the Basic Language Resource Kit (BLaRK) framework Krauwer (ELRA Newslett 3(2), 1998), we used various data collection methods (such as focus groups, questionnaires and personal consultations with HLT experts) to gather detailed information. The South African HLT landscape is analysed using a number of complementary approaches and based on the interpretations of the results, recommendations are made on how to accelerate HLT development in South Africa, as well as on how to conduct similar audits in other countries and contexts.     

‘Salesman? Hell no!’ Identity struggles of nascent design entrepreneurs

The present study offers new input to the discussion of how entrepreneurship education and training programmes can be tailored to suit design professionals. To a large extent, existing entrepreneurship teaching for creative people is based on a traditional administrative management logic that often results in a clash between entrepreneurial demands and creative identities. The paper is based on the following rationale: the better we understand designers' reasoning and their struggles concerning becoming entrepreneurs, the better we are able to design entrepreneurship learning experiences that meet their needs. Since designers' career‐making tends to be highly driven by their strong sense of identity, the paper takes an identity perspective. The empirical foundation of the research is based on observation studies and phenomenological interviews conducted during an eight‐week entrepreneurship training program. Twenty‐five nascent design entrepreneurs with a professional background as designers participated in the voluntary programme. The paper offers novel and critical insights into designers' experiences of the entrepreneurial identity and reasoning as they participate in entrepreneurship training.     

Entrepreneurs’ Intentions and Partnership Towards Innovation: Evidence from the Japanese Film Industry

Many scholars have researched in the field of entrepreneurship and innovation; nevertheless, little attention has been given to a causal relationship between these two concepts; entrepreneurial intention and innovation. In the conventional view, a single outstanding entrepreneur has an intention to induce innovation, and connects market opportunities and resources. However, this view cannot fully explain the situation of entrepreneurial activities led by a team. This article presents a new research framework in entrepreneurship research. First, an entrepreneur can have a relational intention that leads to constructing a partnership. Second, such a partnership, not an individual entrepreneur, has an emerged innovative intention that leads to carrying out innovation in order to establish the competitive advantage. Adopting this framework, we examine cases in the Japanese film industry and clarifying the relational development between entrepreneur’s intention and innovation. From this study a new theoretical foundation on the dynamics of entrepreneurial intentions and outcomes in creative industries arises, and it unpacks the initial stage of innovation where organizations are newly created by employing micro viewpoints such as individuals and partnerships.     

Executive Information System implementation in organisations in South Africa and Spain: A comparative analysis

Executive Information Systems (EIS) grew out of the information needs of executives and are designed to serve the needs of users in strategic planning and decision-making. EIS are high risk information technology implementation projects. The authors compare survey studies of EIS implementation in well-established organisations in South Africa and Spain. From a comparative analysis, the authors report eight identified parallelisms and three differences in EIS in these countries and suggest that there is scope and need for continued research in the area of future EIS implementation in these countries.     

Entrepreneurship as design: A design process for the emergence and development of entrepreneurial opportunities

Although firms constantly seek opportunities to launch new products, services, or business models, little is known about the way opportunities emerge and develop. In particular, despite current ontological and epistemological knowledge of entrepreneurial opportunities, the process that drives their emergence and development remains understudied. To enrich our understanding, we conduct an exploratory multiple-case study of six design agencies that supported firms in developing their entrepreneurial endeavours by leveraging design sprint, a hybrid method combining design and entrepreneurship. A primary contribution of our study is the conceptualization of a process model illustrating how design (sprint) can support the emergence and development of entrepreneurial opportunities. The model advances four actions that enable translating insights into opportunities: defining, framing, experimenting, and learning. Our findings also offer interesting insights on the role of third-party agents in this process. Indeed, design agencies can act as facilitators in enacting entrepreneurship as design by supporting the emergence and development of entrepreneurial opportunities. Our research also contributes to the debate on the timing of entrepreneurial endeavours, offering an empirical portrayal of their chronology. In this sense, our model also contributes to managerial practice, providing a sequence of actions that can guide the emergence and development of entrepreneurial opportunities.     

The Tied Entrepreneur: On the Theory and Practice of Institutionalisation of Creativity and Innovation in Service Firms

An empirical study in service firms was used to explore in-company entrepreneurs. The results support the contention that entrepreneurship in large organisations is increasingly a role which is partially created by structured conditions, and by the firm's strategic actions. As such the entrepreneurial behaviour is constrained or tied.     

Developing and maintaining clients’ trust through institutional mechanisms in online service markets for digital entrepreneurs: A process model

Crowdsourcing intermediaries, such as Upwork and ZBJ, are powering a new force of digital entrepreneurs by creating online service markets where service providers seek contracts from clients all over the world. An important reason for this flourishing digital entrepreneurship is that the intermediaries establish institutional mechanisms (IMs) that develop clients’ trust in digital entrepreneurs. However, insights into how intermediaries achieve it remain limited. Although the e-Commerce literature has generated rich findings on intermediary-based trust development, its findings are based on online product markets and thus may not be readily applicable to online service markets. More specifically, these findings are mainly focused on various IMs that facilitate initial trust formation based on variance models. However, a successful service transaction requires not only the initial trust but further development and maintenance of that trust, because it is a cooperative process between clients and vendors. By conducting an in-depth case study of ZBJ, the largest crowdsourcing intermediary in China, this study develops a three-phase process model, whereby the intermediary deploys different sets of IMs that initiate, augment, and maintain clients’ trust in vendors. Our findings make important theoretical contributions to the literature on digital entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing, and e-Commerce trust development.     

The Role of Different Opportunities in the Activation and Use of the Business Opportunity Prototype

This study analyses how the different nature of business opportunities affects the way potential entrepreneurs recognize a business opportunity prototypical features. Although scholars have examined the reasons why some individuals, but not others, identify business opportunities, little is known about how the nature of the business opportunity (i.e., its context) affects the recognition of the business opportunity characteristics. Moreover, most studies on opportunity identification rely either on retrospective data or on entrepreneurs’ prior knowledge and experience. Thus, little is said about how cognitive structures are used by potential entrepreneurs upon opportunity recognition. Participants in this study (70 university students) were presented with one of two scenarios describing two different business opportunities – an independent entrepreneurial opportunity and a business reformulation opportunity – and were asked to describe the business opportunity in their own words. The analysis performed showed that there are significant differences in the way respondents recognized the prototypical characteristics of both business opportunities. Specifically, participants were more risk‐averse in the business reformulation opportunity than in the entrepreneurial opportunity. In the latter case, the participants focused more on customers. No differences were found regarding the identification of prototypical characteristics referring to profit.     

Coordination of purchasing and bidding activities across posted offer and auction markets

In both consumer purchasing and industrial procurement, combinatorial interdependencies among the items to be purchased are commonplace. E-commerce compounds the problem by providing more opportunities for switching suppliers at low costs, but also potentially eases the problem by enabling automated market decision-making systems, commonly referred to as trading agents, to make purchasing decisions in an integrated manner across markets. We are investigating a new approach to deal with the combinatorial interdependency challenges for online markets. This approach relies on existing commercial online market institutions such as posted-offer markets and various online auctions that sell single items. It uses trading agents to coordinate a buyer’s purchasing and bidding activities across multiple online markets simultaneously to achieve the best overall procurement effectiveness. This paper presents two sets of models related to this approach. The first set of models formalizes optimal purchasing decisions across posted-offer markets with fixed transaction costs. The second set of models is concerned with the coordination of bidding activities across multiple online auctions.Research reported in this paper was partially supported by a Proposition 301 Electronic Commerce Grant, University of Arizona Eller College of Management. The first author is also affiliated with The Key Lab of Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, and was supported in part by a grant for open research projects (ORP-0303) from CAS. Earlier versions of this paper have appeared in the Proceedings of the Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-37) and the Proceedings of the 13th Annual Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS ’03).     

Clean development mechanism in China: Regional distribution and prospects

Late in 2012, when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol came to an end, it was further extended to December 2020. This was based on the strong realisation that the clean development mechanism (CDM) projects have been playing an important role globally, particularly in promoting clean development in China. Based on a review of international and domestic sources, the paper analyses the progress in the development of CDM projects both globally and in China.China has attracted the lion share of CDM investment in terms of projects located in this country and the global annual certified emission reductions under this mechanism. Due to the relative easiness of implementation, the main area of investment is new and renewable energy. China's fast economic development, open door investment policy, political stability, high educational and technological standards and reliable infrastructure are all encouraging the interest of foreign investors seeking to reduce their domestic carbon footprint. In order to facilitate the location of CDM projects, the Chinese government formulated a series of policies and regulations as well as established national coordinating groups for climate change, CDM Designated National Authorities and projects auditing boards, which are responsible for projects application, auditing and management.There are however large differences in the regional distribution of Chinese CDM projects. Provinces, such as Yunnan, Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, Hunan and Gansu (located in central and western China) are attracting more projects because of their rich hydro and wind resources while there are very few projects in the eastern already developed parts of the country. This trend is consistent with the CDM's main goal to assist less developed regions to achieve a more sustainable development.     

Generating innovation potential: How digital entrepreneurs conceal,sequence, anchor,and propagate new technology

Organizations that fail to innovate become disrupted by those that do. Digital technology makes corporate entrepreneurship increasingly potent and prolific but simultaneously blurs the link between entrepreneurial processes and innovation outcomes. Our understanding of how corporate entrepreneurship with digital technology unfolds in organizations is thus limited. We develop a framework that captures four tactics that digital entrepreneurs may use to generate innovation potential. Specifically, we report how these tactics helped employees at a Norwegian hospital to develop and scale an application for time planning and resource analytics. Our study shows that managing digital entrepreneurship strategically requires organizations to harness the multiplicity in information systems (IS) use that increasingly malleable digital technology affords.     

陕西省民办高校创新创业型跨境电商人才培养模式

近年来随着跨境电商的发展，创新创业型跨境电商人才缺口增大。立足陕西民办高校，首先从市场需求、教学资 源整合、校企合作的角度论证陕西民办高校培养创新创业型跨境电商人才的可行性，分析陕西民办高校存在的缺乏跨境电商创新创业能力的培养、实践性环节成效有待提升等问题，在此基础上从培养目标、课程体系、成立电商工作室、培养学生创新创业意识方面提出完善陕西民办高校创新创业型跨境电商人才培养模式的建议。     

Information and communication technology and local governance: understanding the difference between cities in developed and emerging economies

The current literature on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and planning suggests that the use of Information Technology (IT) in local government can enhance the management and functioning of cities. Of particular interest is the phenomenon of e-government, where debates and information surrounding local government matters are conducted in cyberspace. Of relevance also, are the networking opportunities that the Internet can facilitate between city governments and the institutional learning that can emanate from that. The increasing use of web-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications raises awareness of spatial issues that impact on defined municipal areas, whilst interactive mapping provides opportunities for addressing spatial concerns virtually. Most of the literature does, however, focus on the experience of developed countries where capacity and resources permit a sophisticated understanding of ICT. Yet, evidence suggests that these tools are also used in some developing countries, with India often cited as one of the leading countries in achieving ICT prominence, but little seems to be published about this experience in Southern Africa. There are a number of innovative initiatives underway in South African local governments but most of these interventions are in their infancy. In contrast, there are a number of examples in developed countries that may provide some guidance for developing cities. This paper examines the Smart City initiative in Brisbane in Australia, and compares it with moves currently underway in Durban, South Africa to incorporate ICT in local governance. The intention is to expose the differences in approach, understand the capacity and resource issues that may impact, and draw some conclusions with regards to future interventions in Durban. Overall, the paper provides an initial conceptual landscape that begins to determine the extent to which ICT in local government can provide opportunities for Durban by learning from the experience of Brisbane, Australia.     

GEM: A global electronic market system

The emergence and growing popularity of electronic commerce in general and Internet auctions in particular, has raised the challenge to explore scalable global electronic markets, involving both human and automated traders. While centralized auctions are believed to provide better economic results in conventional markets, a single auction server over the public Internet is not scalable and not reliable, due to the potential for very high load and because of the unpredictable and generally low network bandwidth, and it may not be feasible due to local autonomy constraints, which demand some degree of control over local trading policies. GEM is a Java based generic framework for decentralized Internet-based markets. It strives to balance the single-market abstraction, which is important for economic efficiency, with a geographically distributed physical market, which is essential for system efficiency, scalability and autonomy. This is done through the introduction of wide-area-oriented yet consistent distributed trading methods, and a scalable distributed architecture. The second main contribution of GEM is in the design of an individual (local) auction market. GEM provides a flexible architecture that delineates the abstract components of a generic market and specifies control and dataflow constraints between them, but allows variations in the concrete implementation of components with minimal or no impact on the implementation of other components. In addition, GEM provides dynamic (re)configuration and pluggability of policy components at runtime, which enables to adapt market policies to variations in trading patterns or system behavior, adding another level of flexibility to market designers and administrators.     

Short-Term Price Overreactions: Identification,Testing, Exploitation

This paper examines short-term price reactions after one-day abnormal price changes and whether they create exploitable profit opportunities in various financial markets. Statistical tests confirm the presence of overreactions and also suggest that there is an “inertia anomaly”, i.e. after an overreaction day prices tend to move in the same direction for some time. A trading robot approach is then used to test two trading strategies aimed at exploiting the detected anomalies to make abnormal profits. The results suggest that a strategy based on counter-movements after overreactions does not generate profits in the FOREX and the commodity markets, but in some cases it can be profitable in the US stock market. By contrast, a strategy exploiting the “inertia anomaly” produces profits in the case of the FOREX and the commodity markets, but not in the case of the US stock market.     

Linking information systems and entrepreneurship: A review and agenda for IT‐associated and digital entrepreneurship research

More than 50 years ago, information technology (IT) began to change society, the economy, and industries worldwide. This change has included waves of technological disruption that have been exploited by entrepreneurial actors who seize the associated new opportunities. Research on related phenomena is spread across different disciplines. Recently, there have been calls for further research on the marriage of information systems (IS) and entrepreneurship. We review 292 articles in the IS, entrepreneurship, and general and strategic management literature to create an overview of the IT‐associated entrepreneurship research landscape. On the basis of that review, we elaborate on the different roles that IT can assume to support entrepreneurial operations and value creation in these settings. Our findings suggest that IT plays four major roles in entrepreneurial operations: as a facilitator, making the operations of start‐ups easier; as a mediator for new ventures' operations; as an outcome of entrepreneurial operations; and as a ubiquity, becoming the business model itself. Leveraging these roles of IT, we develop a set of definitions to clear up definition uncertainties surrounding IT‐associated new ventures such as digital start‐ups and digital business models. We also outline a research agenda for IT‐associated entrepreneurship research based on identified roles, types, and gaps.