Vorbilder und Inspirationen für Gründerinnen

Frauen sind im Startup-Sektor immer noch stark untervertreten. Die «Female Founder Initiative» will dies ändern. Bereits 300 Unternehmerinnen wurden so unterstützt. Jüngst hat Eva Parth dos Santos mit ihrer Firma Mint Girls davon profitiert

Entrepreneurship as catalyst for sustainable development : opening the black box

In the last decades, sustainable development has become an important topic of discussion for scholars and practitioners concerned with environmental issues. Since the publication of the Brundtland Report, which represents a milestone in triggering awareness for sustainability issues, sustainable development has steadily gained popularity to become one of the most important environmental discourses today. Together with innovation, the United Nations identified entrepreneurship as a key element for addressing sustainable development challenges. Due to its growing recognition as a driver of sustainable development, entrepreneurship is subject to research across many scientific disciplines. To systemize the current state of knowledge, the purpose of this paper is to systematically review recent literature and to outline how sustainable development influences entrepreneurial activities and vice versa. In addition, it investigates whether and under what circumstances entrepreneurship can contribute to the economic, environmental and social dimension of sustainable development. The systematic literature review shows that several research areas, such as opportunities, motivations, competencies, strategies and business models of sustainability-oriented entrepreneurs, have already received wide coverage by academic literature. However, our knowledge about how entrepreneurial activities contribute to the achievement of the United Nations sustainable development goals is still limited and should be addressed by further research

Value configurations in sharing economy business models

The sharing economy gains momentum and develops a major economic impact on traditional markets and firms. However, only rudimentary theoretical and empirical insights exist on how sharing networks, i.e., focal firms, shared goods providers and customers, create and capture value in their sharing-based business models. We conduct a qualitative study to find key differences in sharing-based business models that are decisive for their value configurations. Our results show that (1) customization versus standardization of shared goods and (2) the centralization versus particularization of property rights over the shared goods are two important dimensions to distinguish value configurations. A second, quantitative study confirms the visibility and relevance of these dimensions to customers. We discuss strategic options for focal firms to design value configurations regarding the two dimensions to optimize value creation and value capture in sharing networks. Firms can use this two-dimensional search grid to explore untapped opportunities in the sharing economy

To network or not to network - is that really the question? : the impact of networking intensity and strategic orientations on innovation success

Innovation success typically leads to company success. That is, firms that successfully create and launch innovations often grow in terms of revenues, profits, and head count. Societies benefit not only from new products and services, but also from new jobs, as created through innovating firms. Thus, innovation success potentially leads to increased societal wealth. However, the question arises: What factors help companies to become successful innovators? Research shows that networking activities between firms and their stakeholders have an important impact on innovation success. This is particularly true for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that often lack crucial resources that enable them to innovate. However, a few existing studies do not support the finding that networking leads to increased innovation outputs. So, we must ask: Under which circumstances do networking activities enable SMEs to become successful innovators? In this study, we analyze a sample of 451 SMEs and, using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), find that the question is not whether to network or not. Rather, both high- and low-intensity networking firms can use different combinations of underlying strategic orientations and resource-leveraging capabilities to enable innovation success

Family firm configurations for high performance: The role of entrepreneurship and ambidexterity

The performance drivers of family firms have spawned considerable research interest. Almost exclusively this research has relied on independent sets of explanatory variables in linear analyses. These analyses mask the complex interdependencies that are likely to exist among key success factors, leading to faulty theory and misspecified implications for practice. As treatment, we propose a configuration approach to family firm performance that accounts for complex interdependencies among entrepreneurial, innovation and family influence conditions. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of a sample of 129 Finnish family firms, we identify sufficient conditions with regards to the existence or absence of antecedent conditions to family firm performance. These conditions include entrepreneurial orientation, exploration and exploitation activities that form causal paths towards family firm performance. To enrich our analysis, we theorize and empirically analyse how these conditions might differ in family firms with high and low levels of family influence. We deepen the current understanding of configurations that promote the performance of family firms, offer important implications for theory and practice, and set new directions for future research on the strategic management of family firms. Our results are also virtually identical and insensitive to change across subjective and objective performance measures

The status quo of research on entrepreneurial orientation : conversational landmarks and theoretical scaffolding

This research aims to gain a deeper appreciation of where the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) conversation has gained momentum based upon an analysis of its key conversational landmarks and the studies which have thus far provided its principal theoretical scaffolding. Drawing upon a bibliometric analysis of 62,499 citations from all 822 publications on EO existing so far, thereby building the most comprehensive overview of EO studies collected to date, we are able to identify which studies, journals, and disciplines have offered critical landmarks within the conversation. Moreover, we categorize these influential landmark studies into four primary areas, namely “Defining pieces”, “Methods and measurement”, “Contingencies”, and “Impact”, and discuss how prominent landmarks within the EO conversation have created the current theoretical scaffolding upon which EO research is now building. Notably, our study observes Schumpeter (1934) theory of entrepreneurship and innovation as ‘creative destruction’ as well as Barney (1991) resource-based view (RBV) as landmarks within EO’s present theoretical scaffolding

Radiation enhancement and "temperature" in the collapse regime of gravitational scattering

We generalize the semiclassical treatment of graviton radiation to gravitational scattering at very large energies $\sqrt{s}\gg m_P$ and finite scattering angles $\Theta_s$, so as to approach the collapse regime of impact parameters $b \simeq b_c \sim R\equiv 2G\sqrt{s}$. Our basic tool is the extension of the recently proposed, unified form of radiation to the ACV reduced-action model and to its resummed-eikonal exchange. By superimposing that radiation all-over eikonal scattering, we are able to derive the corresponding (unitary) coherent-state operator. The resulting graviton spectrum, tuned on the gravitational radius $R$, fully agrees with previous calculations for small angles $\Theta_s\ll 1$ but, for sizeable angles $\Theta_s(b)\leq \Theta_c = O(1)$ acquires an exponential cutoff of the large $\omega R$ region, due to energy conservation, so as to emit a finite fraction of the total energy. In the approach-to-collapse regime of $b\to b_c^+$ we find a radiation enhancement due to large tidal forces, so that the whole energy is radiated off, with a large multiplicity $\langle N \rangle\sim Gs \gg 1$ and a well-defined frequency cutoff of order $R^{-1}$. The latter corresponds to the Hawking temperature for a black hole of mass notably smaller than $\sqrt{s}$.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics, 5-12 July, Venice, Ital

β-secretase inhibition prevents structural spine plasticity deficits in AppNL-G-F mice

All clinical BACE1-inhibitor trials for the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) have failed due to insufficient efficacy or side effects like worsening of cognitive symptoms. However, the scientific evidence to date suggests that BACE1-inhibition could be an effective preventative measure if applied prior to the accumulation of amyloid-beta (Aβ)-peptide and resultant impairment of synaptic function. Preclinical studies have associated BACE1-inhibition-induced cognitive deficits with decreased dendritic spine density. Therefore, we investigated dose-dependent effects of BACE1-inhibition on hippocampal dendritic spine dynamics in an APP knock-in mouse line for the first time. We conducted in vivo two-photon microscopy in the stratum oriens layer of hippocampal CA1 neurons in 3.5-month-old AppNL-G-FGFP-M mice over 6 weeks to monitor the effect of potential preventive treatment with a high and low dose of the BACE1-inhibitor NB-360 on dendritic spine dynamics. Structural spine plasticity was severely impaired in untreated AppNL-G-FGFP-M mice, although spines were not yet showing signs of degeneration. Prolonged high-dose BACE1-inhibition significantly enhanced spine formation, improving spine dynamics in the AD mouse model. We conclude that in an early AD stage characterized by low Aβ-accumulation and no irreversible spine loss, BACE1-inhibition could hold the progressive synapse loss and cognitive decline by improving structural spine dynamics

Management research and religion : a citation analysis

Research on management with regard to religion became a growing field of interest in the last decades. Nevertheless, the impact of religion on actor’s economic behavior is also an old research topic, as the writings of Max Weber (The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Allen and Unwin, London, 1930) underline. The purpose of this contribution is to highlight the developments of this topic and to guide scholars to identify possible gaps. The structuring and investigation on this topic will help us to advance and better understand past research, while leading to some further reflections. We conduct a citation analysis of 215 articles and 7,968 cited references to examine the citation structure and make out the most-influential publications that have shaped research most so far. On the basis of the analysis it is to be assumed that three research streams affect progress: Best practices regarding performance issues, religion at work as well as religion, and personal ethics. Finally, the publications that each topic-clusters contains are reflected and discussed to achieve a structural overview of the state of the art of research