Smart cities and entrepreneurship: An agenda for future research

Smart city is an entrepreneurial city. There is a bidirectional relationship between entrepreneurship and smart cities. First, entrepreneurs initiate technological interventions that help cities undergo socio-technical transitions and become smart cities. Second, the technologies being adopted in cities generate data which then helps enterprises to explore new opportunities. Despite the potential of this bidirectional relationship, this connection has been less explored. In order to fill the gap, this paper reviews the extant literature in the field to contextualize the role that entrepreneurship plays in building smart cities and how smart cities influence entrepreneurial business models. I referred to 479 papers published until June 2017 on smart cities and 35 papers out of those related to entrepreneurship using the method of clustered content analysis. This article contributes towards increasing our understanding of this bidirectional relationship, and opens up research avenues for future research in the fields of smart cities and entrepreneurship

Sustainable entrepreneurship training: A study of motivational factors

We argue that sustainable entrepreneurship training typically aims to achieve one of the three objectives – initiate, ensure and integrate. Based on this assertion, we conducted a field study in India to answer the following research question - What motivates business schools to undertake sustainable entrepreneurship training? We interviewed 37 sustainable entrepreneurship programme educators. Our results indicate that business schools engage in sustainable entrepreneurship training to encourage students address growing social problems by initiating sustainable enterprises. These findings highlight that the business schools focus on ‘initiate’ based training, which may help create ventures, but not to help grow the sustainable entrepreneurship industry. This study makes three contributions in the sustainable entrepreneurship field

Smart technologies for fighting pandemics: The techno- and human- driven approaches in controlling the virus transmission

How do governments in China and Western democracies differ in their technological response to control the transmission of the pandemic? Based on an analysis of academic papers, World Health Organization reports and newspapers, this research compares two opposing approaches, whereas the Chinese cities and government have adopted a techno-driven approach, Western governments have adopted a human-driven approach to control the transmission of Covid-19. The findings highlight that although the techno driven approach may be more productive to identify, isolate and quarantine infected individuals, it also results in the suppression and censoring the citizen views. It is further emphasized that human interaction with the technology is mediated by the political and institutional context in which the technologies are implemented. This paper contributes to literature by understanding the human-technology relationship, and offers five practical observations for controlling virus transmissions during pandemics

Why distance matters: The relatedness between technology development and its appropriation in smart cities

How does the distance between the development and adoption of technology determine its affordance? By referring to the sociomateriality literature, I discuss why the corporate-driven push of technologies into smart cities can lead to ineffective outcomes. This review paper then argues that technologies should be locally built, with a stronger connect between the humans in cities and the technologies being developed and implemented, in order to achieve technological affordance. Finally, I identify a number of research avenues to understand technology-human connect in smart cities

Blended Value Creation: The Mediating Role of Competences

Research on prosocial entrepreneurship so far has focused either on ex-ante motives to create prosocial enterprises or on ex-post strategies to protect mission orientation. Surprisingly little is known about the prosocial entrepreneurial competences that help acquire resources to create blended value once a venture has been established. To fill this gap, we conduct a qualitative study in an Indian setting from which we determine that prosocial entrepreneurs adopt three types of competence encompassing seven dimensions to assemble resources when they establish their ventures. This study makes three contributions into prosocial entrepreneurship literature

Contributions of Smart City Solutions and Technologies to Resilience against the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Literature Review

Since its emergence in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has swept through many cities around the world, claiming millions of lives and causing major socio-economic impacts. The pandemic occurred at an important historical juncture when smart solutions and technologies have become ubiquitous in many cities. Against this background, in this review, we examine how smart city solutions and technologies have contributed to resilience by enhancing planning, absorption, recovery, and adaptation abilities. For this purpose, we reviewed 147 studies that have discussed issues related to the use of smart solutions and technologies during the pandemic. The results were synthesized under four themes, namely, planning and preparation, absorption, recovery, and adaptation. This review shows that investment in smart city initiatives can enhance the planning and preparation ability. In addition, the adoption of smart solutions and technologies can, among other things, enhance the capacity of cities to predict pandemic patterns, facilitate an integrated and timely response, minimize or postpone transmission of the virus, provide support to overstretched sectors, minimize supply chain disruption, ensure continuity of basic services, and offer solutions for optimizing city operations. These are promising results that demonstrate the utility of smart solutions for enhancing resilience. However, it should be noted that realizing this potential hinges on careful attention to important issues and challenges related to privacy and security, access to open-source data, technological affordance, legal barriers, technological feasibility, and citizen engagement. Despite this, this review shows that further development of smart city initiatives can provide unprecedented opportunities for enhancing resilience to the pandemic and similar future events

Social Entrepreneurship, Energy and Urban Innovations

Energy has become a central focus of human existence and lack of access to energy is an indication of lack of access to many basic needs. Especially people in developing countries face a greater hurdle to access electricity. Given the constraints in the capacities of developing countries, it may be difficult to cater for the escalating energy needs in urban areas unless innovative methods are explored. However, what becomes very significant in this mileu in developing countries is the fact that the third sector is emerging very strong—in particular, social enterprises with their innovative strategies, processes and methods to provide access to energy and protect the environment from over-usage of natural resources. With this background, the current chapter, through a case study approach, attempts to explore how social entrepreneurs in India adopt better ways of providing energy to the excluded and marginalized social sections

Design thinking in social organizations: Understanding the role of user engagement

Design thinking has recently gained significant attention as a potential approach to address major global problems. Although its practice is proven to contribute to advance organizational efficiency and address user needs, lack of understanding about its practice in social organizations limits our understanding about its social context. With this background, we study how users persuade social organizations to adopt design thinking. We conducted a qualitative study in four social organizations in India during 2008–2013 and interviewed 38 respondents to answer our research question. Our results indicate that the designer roles are blurred when social organizations adopt design thinking, where users in the form of interconnecting agency reduce the gap between designers and communities

Social Entrepreneurship as a Tool to Remedy Social Exclusion

Inspired by the practice of social enterprises, this article aims to understand how work integration social enterprises (WISE) function in relation to labour market integration of socially excluded persons in India. While mainly examining how socially excluded persons benefit from such interventions, questions are asked about what motivates social enterprises to get involved and to what extent they benefit themselves. Built on case study research in India, this article identifies a potential win–win situation, as members of excluded communities are empowered through the work integration approach, but social enterprises also benefit by building trust and achieving a sustainable orientation