Did COVID lockdowns harm entrepreneurship? Not exactly

The prevalent view is that COVID lockdowns have severely harmed entrepreneurship, but have they? Gorgi Krlev, Katharina Scheidgen, Franziska Günzel-Jensen, Miriam Wolf, and Ali Aslan Gümüsay write that physical distancing created new digital spaces and led to unconventional ways of integrating new people, new products, and new purpose into entrepreneurship. They observed instances in which entrepreneurs opened their mind in fundamental ways to provide services which deviated clearly from their original mission

Freemium Business Models as the Foundation for Growing an E-business Venture: A Multiple Case Study of Industry Leaders

In e-business freemium business models have become legitiate. However, current research provides litte insight on how the free and premium offring should be employed to lead to growth and success in the long run. The presented research aims to fil this gap by investiatig how the property ‘free’ was employed in young entrepreneurial ventures’ business models in the initil life-cycle stages – opportunity recognitin, market entry, and market exploitatin. We fid that various forms of freemium business models are employed through the initil life-cycle stages of a new venture for reasons of trial-and-error, learning, exploratin, legitiizatin and resource acquisitin. A freemium business model can also serve as a nascent business model, though without a sustainable monetiatin component, for fiding a sustainable business model through a series of dynamic adjustments. With our fidings we contribute to the business model literature in three ways: First, our empirical fidings show the many-sidedness of the component ‘free’ in freemium business models. Free users are of importance for network building, exploratin and exploitatin and growth over tie. Moreover, free users enable directly and indirectly further resource acquisitin. Second, while previous literature has taken a stati perspectie, we contribute by illustratig the dynamic process of strategic business model design for growth. Finally, we introduce the concept of the nascent business model which is new to the literature

Towards a Typology of Sustainability Practices: A Study of the Potentials and Challenges of Sustainable Practices at the Firm Level

International awareness and demands for sustainable development have pushed the sustainability narrative into the forefront of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As a result, the call for sustainable business practices has never been greater. While businesses are both needed and eager to contribute to sustainable development, current literature lacks insights into how businesses can practice sustainability. This paper aims to fill this gap and develop an understanding of the different categories of sustainability practices that firms adopt, and the potentials and challenges associated with them. Based on a qualitative multiple case study, we identify four categories of sustainability practices including inspiring and informing, productizing, co-creating and system building. We integrate these findings into a sustainability maturity typology, proposing that these four practices are associated with an increasing intensity of sustainability intention, so that firms realize increasing levels of sustainability in the focal business practices as they move from inspiring and informing through to system building. The article concludes by arguing that there is no generic “one size fits all” approach to support sustainability practices as approaches need to fit a firm’s sustainability maturity

Crises and entrepreneurial opportunities : Digital social innovation in response to physical distancing

As physical distancing is a core measure of containing the spread of COVID-19, this pandemic is a crisis that has uprooted social interaction. While current research mainly focuses on crises as a challenge for entrepreneurial ventures and potential regulatory response mechanisms, we complement this research by addressing the question of how crises in general—and COVID-19's physical distancing measures in particular—shape entrepreneurial opportunities for social innovation. Based on two rounds of data collection—desktop research mapping out 95 entrepreneurial activities in Germany and four focus groups—we find first that entrepreneurs are proactive agents in alleviating the negative consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. They do so by creating two types of digital social innovation: digital brokering and digitized services. Second, we note that negative societal consequences of crises can be buffered by shifts in entrepreneurs’ strategic orientation through improvised venturing, rapid pivoting and pro-social product extension. Third, we note variance in the persistence of changes with consequences for entrepreneurial opportunities and social innovation: Whereas some social innovation are rather ephemeral, others might endure and promise long-term impacts. We offer key insights for the literature on crisis, social innovation and hybrid organizing as well as on the implications for entrepreneurship practice and policy

Tackling Grand Challenges Collaboratively: The Role of Value-driven Sensegiving

In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurs can deploy their values to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders. Such an understanding forms a critical endeavor to tackle grand challenges adequately. Building on sensegiving research, we conducted a single-case study of an entrepreneurial initiative that tackles gender inequality in Lebanon which has been successful in mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders who ordinarily would not collaborate with each other. We find that the values of the founders were pivotal for the initiative’s success as those values activated latent values of stakeholders through processes of contextualization and enactment. We subsume these processes under the label value-driven sensegiving. As a result of value-driven sensegiving, heterogeneous stakeholders could make sense of the founders’ aspirational vision and the role they could play in it, which paved ways for tackling grand challenges collaboratively. Our study provides insights into the centrality of values for mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders across boundaries. Therefore, it contributes to the body of work on sensegiving, societal grand challenges, and new forms of organizing.Peer reviewe