Inspired or foolhardy: sensemaking, confidence and entrepreneurs' decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of confidence in how both new and experienced entrepreneurs interpret and make sense of their business environment to inform decision-making. We illustrate our conceptual arguments with descriptive results from a large-scale (n = 6289) survey on entrepreneurs' perception of business performance and their decisions taken at a time of uncertainty in an economic downturn. Quantitative findings are stratified along experiential lines to explore heterogeneity in entrepreneurial decision-making and directly inform our conceptual arguments, while qualitative data from open questions are used to explain the role of confidence. Newer entrepreneurs are found to be more optimistic in the face of environmental risk, which impacts on their decision-making and innovative capabilities. However, the more experienced entrepreneurs warily maintain margin and restructure to adapt to environmental changes. Instead of looking directly at the confidence of individuals, we show how confidence impacts sensemaking, and ultimately, decision-making. These insights inform research on the behaviour of novice and experienced entrepreneurs in relation to innovative business activities. Specifically, blanket assumptions on the role of confidence may be misplaced as its impact changes with experience to alter how entrepreneurs make sense of their environment

Using of Open-Source Technologies for the Design and Development of a Speech Processing System Based on Stemming Methods

This article discusses the idea of developing an intelligent and customizable automated system for real-time text and voice dialogs with the user. This system can be used for almost any subject area, for example, to create an automated robot - a call center operator or smart chat bots, assistants, and so on. This article presents the developed flexible architecture of the proposed system. The system has many independent submodules. These modules work as interacting microservices and use several speech recognition schemes, including a decision support submodule, third-party speech recognition systems and a post-processing subsystem. In this paper, the post-processing module of the recognized text is presented in detail on the example of Russian and English dictionary models. The proposed submodule also uses several processing steps, including the use of various stemming methods, the use of word stop-lists or other lexical structures, the use of stochastic keyword ranking using a weight table, etc. © 2020, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.Acknowledgments. The work was supported by Act 211 Government of the Russian Federation, contract no. 02.A03.21.0006

Organizing for Commons-Enabling Decision-Making Under Conflicting Institutional Logics in Social Entrepreneurship

Abstract Social entrepreneurship develops innovative opportunities and solutions aimed to (re)generate the common good. This emerging organizational form poses unprecedented challenges to group decision and negotiation studies. This article lever- ages conceptual tools from the literature on the commons and institutional logics as it explores the organizational conditions of social entrepreneurship that trigger commons-enabling decision-making in its organizational field. Through an inductive analysis of a longitudinal case, this study proposes a model that highlights the critical role of the bridging organization that can be introduced by the social entrepreneur in a previously fragmented organizational field. This bridging organization is in the con- dition to develop an innovative co-creation logic that can serve as a common ground to enable collaboration between actors from diverse and even conflicting institutional logics. The proposed model suggests that a practice-driven path to the construction of such a common ground for decision-making is more effective than a disclosure-driven path, which is based on classical conflict analysis techniques. The ICT-enabled activ- ity system developed by the social entrepreneur injects transparency and traceability into a previously opaque field, thus creating the conditions for distributed, flexible, and complementary sense- and decision-making processes that develop and protect the commons