PurposeThe paper aims to contributes on the debates about University Idea Incubation by investigating the role and the engagement of different University's stakeholders in the process of opportunity ...recognition in an entrepreneurship education program targeted at students with an interdisciplinary background.Design/methodology/approachThrough a longitudinal case study methodology, the Contamination Lab at University of Salento (Lecce, Italy), the learning approaches and the knowledge process to create an entrepreneurial awareness, mindset and capability in students with different educational background are presented.FindingsThe findings demonstrates the crucial role of stakeholders' engagement for business idea presentation, open innovation challenge, contamination workshop on specialized topics, enterprise projects are important vehicle for effective students' business ideas and innovative projects development in a multidisciplinary environment. The close interaction among students, academia, companies and institutions creates a favourable environment that enables opportunity identification, idea generation through a deep contamination of knowledge, skills and experiences.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations include the need to generalise the results even if this limitation is typical of the case study methodology. Other research is necessary for an in-depth analysis in deep of the other Contamination Lab in Italy and to derive the “invariance traits” of this environment according to the features of the local entrepreneurial ecosystems.Practical implicationsImplications for practices include recommendations for designing innovative programs where the interactions between University-Institutions-Industry are realized.Originality/valueA conceptual framework is proposed by defining all the entrepreneurial knowledge process and knowledge creation within the Contamination Lab, highlighting the contribution of the stakeholders in each phase and learning initiative of the program.
Kees van der Heijden is an icon in the futures and foresight academic and practitioner community. Educated at the Technische Universiteit Delft, his work at Royal Dutch Shell, the Global Business ...Network, the Strathclyde Business School at University of Strathclyde, the Saïd Business School and the Templeton College at University of Oxford, and the Netherlands Business School at Nijenrode University has shaped the scholarly field of futures studies as well as the practical world of scenario facilitation. This article is a 25‐year reflective and retrospective book review of Kees van der Heijden's seminal text Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. The authors conducted interviews with colleagues, coworkers, collaborators, students, and friends of Kees van der Heijden to add depth and dimension to this retrospective work. To bring van der Heijden's work into scholarly conversation with the extant literature, we also situated this return to Scenarios in the context of related works and other reviews of both editions of the book.
Student entrepreneurship is becoming more relevant for universities throughout the world. Therefore, it is important to analyze the strategies and mechanisms adopted by universities to support ...student entrepreneurship. In this article, we analyze the mechanisms used by universities to promote student entrepreneurship through University Business Idea Incubators as part of their Third Mission. University Business Idea Incubators can act as preincubators or preaccelerators that are designed to help a growing number of university students from different backgrounds interact and develop their entrepreneurial ideas in a safe and creative environment. In such a context, we performed a cross-case study methodology on a national program that is aimed at creating Italian University Business Idea Incubators. As a result, we have identified the five key features and 12 strategies adopted by University Business Idea Incubators to cultivate student entrepreneurship. The article also presents some examples of successful business ideas developed by students as a result of their participation in University Business Idea Incubators. The obtained results also demonstrate how University Business Idea Incubators foster intellectual capital to sustain the development of an entrepreneurial mindset and competences, with the objective of favoring both the creation of concrete new ideas and of offering new challenge-based learning approaches to university students. We also offer some ideas that could be incorporated in educational policies to support university student entrepreneurship.
Research Summary
We examine a learning‐by‐doing methodology for iteration of early‐stage business ideas known as the “lean startup.” The purpose of this article is to lay out and test the key ...assumptions of the method, examining one particularly relevant boundary condition: the composition of the startup team. Using unique and detailed longitudinal data on 152 NSF‐supported lean‐startup (I‐Corps) teams, we find that the key components of the method—hypothesis formulation, probing, and business idea convergence—link up as expected. We also find that team composition is an important boundary condition: business‐educated (MBA) members resist the use of the method, but appreciate its value ex post. Formal training in learning‐by‐thinking methods thus appears to limit the spread of learning‐by‐doing methods. In this way, business theory constrains business practice.
Managerial Summary
Lean startup methodology has rapidly become one of the most common and trusted innovation and entrepreneurship methods by corporations, startup accelerators, and policymakers. Unfortunately, it has largely been portrayed as a one‐size‐fits‐all solution—its key assumptions subject to little rigorous empirical testing, and the possibility of critical boundary conditions ignored. Our empirical testing supports the key assumptions of the method, but points to business education of team members as a critical boundary condition. Specifically, MBAs resist the use of the method despite being in a strong position to leverage it. Results from a post hoc analysis we conducted also suggest that more engagement with the method relates to higher performance of the firm in the 18‐month period following the lean startup intervention.
Purpose This article examines some of the trends that allow to understand and analyze the evolution of the idea of entrepreneurship to become a family business. Design/methodology/approach This paper ...is based on systematic research. Findings Around four current trends and four future trends are presented, which allow the authors to understand how the family of an entrepreneur influences in a direct and indirect way in their business, until even managing to transform that business into a family business through planning, organization, management and control exercised by several members of the family of the initial entrepreneur and his future generations in that company. Originality/value This research makes it possible to identify some challenges and opportunities that family businesses must face, which arise from an enterprise and which can help them to have business success, covering part of the past, present and future of such organizations. In this way, this article synthesizes how family dynamics and business dynamics are intertwined through the influence of the family on an entrepreneur’s business model.
It is of key importance to identify the degree of novelty and probability of incorporation of business ideas in an early stage, so that targeted support of these different types of entrepreneurship ...is possible. Selection of business ideas for investments and support programs rely on quantitative and qualitative metrics. The qualitative assessment, however, is biased by subjective impressions and experiences of the decision-maker. Therefore, this paper examines the narrative of business idea descriptions to improve the identification of the degree of novelty and to enhance the estimation of the incorporation probability by advancing the objectivity of qualitative metrics. The paper aims to answer two questions: (1) Are there differences in topic prevalences in novel and non-novel business ideas?, and (2) Does the composition of topics related to a business idea influence its incorporation probability? Structural topic modelling and classification tree analysis are applied on business idea descriptions from a competition in Bremen, Germany, from 2003 until 2019. The results show that business idea descriptions are a rich source of information to identify novel and non-novel business ideas with higher incorporation prospects.
Working with Kees as his apprentice scenario planner, I have been fortunate to have participated in many scenario workshops, both on the Strathclyde MBA program and with organizations. Alongside ...these workshops, I am also very privileged to have been an assistant to Kees on a number of scenario projects with organizations in a range of countries. I have learned many things in the time spent with Kees, and consider his book, “Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation” to be the definitive field guide to the art and craft of scenario planning, albeit there have been a plethora of books on the subject since. The objective of this commentary is to discuss from a practical perspective, three things I have learned from my years of experience with Kees which have proved useful in my scenario work with client organizations, namely the elicitation of client views and insights, the value of the “Business Idea” and the scenario development timescale
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