This paper discusses the influence of Israel Kirzner on the field of entrepreneurship research. We review Kirzner's work and argue that it contains two distinct approaches to entrepreneurship, termed ...Kirzner Mark I and Kirzner Mark II. Mark I with its focus on alertness and opportunity discovery has exerted a strong influence on entrepreneurship research in the last decade, and helped catapult the field forward. We propose that Mark II, with its emphasis on time, uncertainty, and creative action in pursuit of imagined opportunities, complements the discovery view and can provide an alternative conceptual grounding for the decade to come.
One of the most frequently discussed topics in the entrepreneurship education literature is current practice in entrepreneurship education with regard to what is taught and how it is taught. The ...literature on entrepreneurship education is replete with statistics and reviews of entrepreneurship courses and programmes. In this paper, the authors take a different approach and propose a model that transcends the current understanding of entrepreneurship. Instead of asking what entrepreneurship education is and what it does, they ask what ideally it should be and should do. The authors suggest that there is a logical progression between existing approaches – paradigms – to teaching entrepreneurship, and that a fourth ‘new’ paradigm, ‘everyday practice’, constitutes the foundation for all other entrepreneurship education because it establishes the core entrepreneurial competence. They further identify four dimensions as the constituent elements of entrepreneurship as everyday practice.
Abstract
This paper explores how entrepreneurs engage in prototyping as part of the venture development process. We conduct a qualitative field study of 156 instances of prototyping across eight ...venture development processes. From a theoretical perspective, we build on alternative and complementary views of entrepreneurial action and their implicit modes of prototyping, emphasizing experimentation and transformation. Our findings identify three important themes in the prototyping process. These include purposes where the entrepreneurs use prototyping for either flexible experimentation or directed transformation. Further, the entrepreneurs predominantly engage in prototype recycling and skills bricolage when prototyping. Accordingly, the studied entrepreneurs carefully navigate purpose and resource investments in prototyping, making extensive use of their existing resource base of skills and prototypes. After noting the positive aspects of prototyping, we also discuss the potentially destructive outcomes of misapplied prototyping in the form of prototyping myopia and problematic path dependencies of the different ways of prototyping.
This article develops a conceptual framework for entrepreneurship education based on a reconceptualization of the individual–opportunity nexus as presented by Shane and Venkataraman. In order to ...achieve this objective, we reinterpret both the basic assumptions pertaining to the individual and the ontological and epistemological nature of entrepreneurial opportunities. On this basis, we build a six-step teaching model, which operationalizes a series of entrepreneurial learning elements. These include (1) identity work, (2) disclosing disharmonies, (3) qualifying disharmonies into general anomalies, (4) constructing innovative solutions, (5) prototyping and (6) business modelling. Finally, we discuss the implications of the reconceptualized framework in terms of the research questions governing the field of entrepreneurship education, for the practice of entrepreneurship education and for policy to promote entrepreneurship education.
This paper shows that a classic metalogical framework, including all Boolean operators, can be used to support the development of a metric behavioural theory for Markov processes. Previously, only ...intuitionistic frameworks or frameworks without negation and logical implication have been developed to fulfill this task. The focus of this paper is on continuous Markovian logic (CML), a logic that characterizes stochastic bisimulation of Markov processes with an arbitrary measurable state space and continuous-time transitions. For a parameter epsilon>0 interpreted as observational error, we introduce an epsilon-parameterized metatheory for CML: we define the concepts of epsilon-satisfiability and epsilon-provability related by a sound and complete axiomatization and prove a series of "parameterized" metatheorems including decidability, weak completeness and finite model property. We also prove results regarding the relations between metalogical concepts defined for different parameters. Using this framework, we can characterize both the stochastic bisimulation relation and various observational preorders based on behavioural pseudometrics. The main contribution of this paper is proving that all these analyses can actually be done using a unified complete Boolean framework. This extends the state of the art in this field, since the related works only propose intuitionistic contexts that limit, for instance, the use of the Boolean logical implication.
We develop a general framework for reasoning about distances between transition systems with quantitative information. Taking as starting point an arbitrary distance on system traces, we show how ...this leads to natural definitions of a linear and a branching distance on states of such a transition system. We show that our framework generalizes and unifies a large variety of previously considered system distances, and we develop some general properties of our distances. We also show that if the trace distance admits a recursive characterization, then the corresponding branching distance can be obtained as a least fixed point to a similar recursive characterization. The central tool in our work is a theory of infinite path-building games with quantitative objectives.
Purpose - The welfare states of Scandinavia have been regarded as forerunners of gender equality, but structural barriers to women's participation in the labour market may discriminate against women ...and create opportunity costs delimiting women's career choices. Family policies are defined to include maternity paternity leave, benefits, childcare and leave to take care of sick children. The aim of this paper is to increase awareness and elucidate the impact of welfare policies on women's entrepreneurship because it may impact on women's entrepreneurial behaviour. Hence, it seeks to investigate the reasons underlying this apparent anomaly so that future policies in Scandinavia and Europe may be tailored to suit the needs of female entrepreneurs.Design methodology approach - The study uses publicly available statistical data combined with unique survey data from a sample of 1,000 sole proprietors (men and women), all members of the Danish Association for the Self-employed, to identify the problems encountered by female entrepreneurs. The survey findings are illustrated with three interviews with female entrepreneurs that have been published in the Danish newspapers discussing the problems encountered by self-employed female entrepreneurs.Findings - Even though the various Scandinavian models provide for ample maternity leave, benefits and childcare, on the whole, the Nordic Welfare Model is too heavily grounded in the ideals of employment favouring employment over entrepreneurship. For example, in Denmark, a sole proprietor is not allowed to work whilst on maternity leave. If she does so, her maternity allowance is reduced. This may be tantamount to closing the business down if you have a child, and may account for the fact that women are generally much older than men when starting a business. The majority of women in the survey are critical of the maternity leave system and 30 percent perceive the childcare system as a significant barrier to starting a business.Research limitations implications - Future research needs to compare the Danish evidence with that from other Nordic countries to establish whether the problem is restricted to Denmark. Additionally, research should focus on identifying whether child-bearing and -rearing influences on the age at which women start a business.Originality value - So far, it has been taken for granted that the initiation of public childcare would facilitate increased entrepreneurship among women. This study shows that this is not necessarily so, and that there is a schism between welfare models that facilitate employment and those that facilitate entrepreneurship.
Simulation distances are essentially approximations of simulation which provide a measure of the extent by which behaviors in systems are inequivalent. In this paper, we consider the general ...quantitative model of weighted transition systems, where transitions are labeled with elements of a finite metric space. We study the so-called point-wise and accumulating simulation distances which provide extensions to the well-known Boolean notion of simulation on labeled transition systems.
We introduce weighted process algebras for finite and regular behavior and offer sound and (approximate) complete inference systems for the proposed simulation distances. We also settle the algorithmic complexity of computing the simulation distances.
Adopting the perspective of ‘entrepreneurship as an everyday practice’ in education, the authors conceptualize opportunities as arising from the everyday practice of individuals. Opportunities are ...thus seen as emanating from the individual entrepreneur's ability to disclose anomalies and disharmonies in their personal life. The paper illustrates how opportunities unfold depending on regional differences, local heritage and gender, to show how entrepreneurship education must take into account differences in context, culture and circumstance. Rather than perceiving entrepreneurship education as universalistic and searching for a generally applicable teaching approach, the authors argue that there is a need to tailor entrepreneurship education to the particular. They therefore propose that the pedagogy of entrepreneurship education should be personalized and they build a conceptual framework that contrasts two opposing views of entrepreneurship education: ‘universalistic’ and ‘idiosyncratic’. Following this distinction, they explore how different elements of entrepreneurship education may be fitted to the particular needs of each individual learner. This insight is relevant for didactic reflections on single entrepreneurship courses and for the construction of an entrepreneurship education curriculum.
Weighted modal transition systems Bauer, Sebastian S.; Fahrenberg, Uli; Juhl, Line ...
Formal methods in system design,
04/2013, Letnik:
42, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Specification theories as a tool in model-driven development processes of component-based software systems have recently attracted a considerable attention. Current specification theories are however ...qualitative in nature, and therefore fragile in the sense that the inevitable approximation of systems by models, combined with the fundamental unpredictability of hardware platforms, makes it difficult to transfer conclusions about the behavior, based on models, to the actual system. Hence this approach is arguably unsuited for modern software systems. We propose here the first specification theory which allows to capture quantitative aspects during the refinement and implementation process, thus leveraging the problems of the qualitative setting.
Our proposed quantitative specification framework uses weighted modal transition systems as a formal model of specifications. These are labeled transition systems with the additional feature that they can model optional behavior which may or may not be implemented by the system. Satisfaction and refinement is lifted from the well-known qualitative to our quantitative setting, by introducing a notion of distances between weighted modal transition systems. We show that quantitative versions of parallel composition as well as quotient (the dual to parallel composition) inherit the properties from the Boolean setting.
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