Innovative Entrepreneurship in Action

Innovative entrepreneurship is considered in a broad range of scientific contributions (Audretsch et al. 2000; Oksanen and Hautamäki 2014) as a fundamental actor for a sustainable smart growth and as a regional advantage. Innovative entrepreneurship’s central role in regional performances is mainly related to its strategic capacity to generate innovations, thus boosting its socioeconomic system (Urbano et al. 2019). These innovative activities allow capturing new technological knowledge and introducing new products and services based on this knowledge (Malerba and McKelvey 2019). As a consequence, healthy rates of both company startups and scale-up processes develop, generating broader economic health. These processes follow different pathways: some companies rely exclusively on organic growth. Others scale up through IPOs (initial public offerings) or through acquisitions of other firms. The organic growth route develops in different ways, since each innovation’s pathway is unique to each company, but there are some common patterns and similarities across companies, mainly in the growth stages and in the strategies implemented. The companies’ various phases usually follow three principal phases: “startup,” “growing to scale,” and “execution and innovation at scale,” with a different set of challenges and milestones (MIT 2015) (Fig. 1.1).

The study of entrepreneurship literature has highlighted the presence of a number of antecedents of successful initiatives at individual, organizational, and ecosystem level. Such conditions assume more peculiar meaning, relevance, and dynamics in the context of technology-based ventures. In them, the entrepreneurial process is conceived, designed, and undertaken in a landscape of digital platforms and multi-stakeholder communities that interact within digital ecosystems. In such an endeavor, the objective of the chapter is to define the multiple meanings of digital entrepreneurship as well as the distinguishing features and “dimensions” of successful digital entrepreneurship. Using theory and practical evidence, a set of key success factors and enabling or facilitating conditions are extracted and organized along a process-based view showing the different stages and steps of the entrepreneurial roadmap. The study is undertaken using a combined desk, premarket, and market view of the entrepreneurial process. The final purpose is to derive the digital entrepreneurship “genome” as well as the key activities for its effective management. While a genome is an organism’s complete set of DNA, including all of its genes, and contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism, the idea of the digital entrepreneurship genome is to identify and classify the DNA of successful digital entrepreneurship. This is done by providing an initial reference framework useful for further theory and practitioner development. In theory, the study can be a knowledge platform for investigating the antecedents for the success of digital entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, for practitioners, the chapter provides a reference guide and management checklist to design and implement more effective initiatives aimed to facilitate, nurture, and develop successful entrepreneurial processes in digital settings.

Starting from firms’ increasing difficulties in creating new value for customers and consequently to achieve a competitive advantage, this chapter proposes an alternative strategic approach based on the notion of tradition. Specifically, tradition is defined as the whole set of competences, knowledge, values, and culture that characterizes a specific firm, territory, and/or age. Analyzing examples of companies that based their competitive advantage on the leveraging of traditions, the chapter clearly shows how tradition may be effectively employed to face competition, allowing companies both to create and to appropriate value.

In the last decades, academic and managerial literatures have paid great attention by about the notion of the business model (BM). Accordingly, a wide range of literature was created to identify and acknowledge the capacity to create and renew organizational BM as one of the fundamental sources of competitiveness and value creation. However, until now, the notion and application of business model innovation (BMI) research has mostly been developed in relation to large companies and organizations. Very limited studies have explored what and how context-specific characteristics and knowledge asset management may have effects on BM development and organizations’ sustainability. This latter aspect is particularly true for technological start-ups. Until now, research and managerial practice have been not aligned with national and international policies’ great emphasis on technological start-ups, as well as about the role of the BMI to support organizational performance improvement and stimulate entrepreneurship. From this perspective, technological start-ups represent an interesting basis for analyzing business model mapping and BMI along a knowledge-based perspective. The creation, survival, development, and market success of such organizations are mainly based on the identification, acquisition, and exploitation of their knowledge-based assets. Therefore, it can be relevant to study and analyze how such knowledge assets significantly drive organizational performance and value creation by leveraging innovative technology breakthroughs, highly qualified and distinctive competencies, and implicit knowledge embedded into valuable networks of relationships.

Based on a set of theoretical assumptions and some first empirical insights, this chapter aims to link the notions and the tools of business model (BM) mapping and business model innovation (BMI) with intellectual capital (IC) management issues. It provides a set of empirical cases of common and different patterns that technological start-ups follow for innovating their BM by leveraging their IC assets, as well as the enabling conditions that may support and sustain the overall process. The study relies on exploratory research based on analysis of three case studies with data gathered through personal interviews with the companies’ founders.

This chapter aims to explore the contribution of project management (PM) to business startups, presenting a PM-based interpretative framework predicated on the assumption that business startups can be interpreted as entrepreneurial projects. The framework combines the evolutionary path of the business startup life cycle with PM approaches and methodologies to support startuppers in addressing the uncertainty of the entrepreneurial process. Focusing on the business startup project life cycle, the framework examines the critical issues in managing each stage, the most suitable PM approaches, and lastly the tools, techniques, and interpersonal skills that startuppers need to organize their activities. The findings demonstrate that managing flourishing business startup projects can be supported by balancing traditional and agile project management methodologies according to the level of uncertainty and complexity of the different stages of their launch and development. Implications for theory relate to the unconventional connection between the literature on PM and entrepreneurship; implications for practices include the adoption of the proposed framework as a roadmap to support nascent entrepreneurs in managing entrepreneurial projects.

The emergence of exponential technologies, along with the affirmation of a collective intelligence paradigm, is creating new competitive pressures and entrepreneurial opportunities for organizations aiming to generate a spectrum of diverse outputs ranging from product innovation to large-scale corporate renewal. The entrepreneurial process designed and realized within the organization has traditionally been referred to as corporate entrepreneurship. Today, the affirmation of open innovation and the increasing role of employee creativity and initiative as drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship activities in companies are giving rise to a new concept of “crowdventuring.” In particular, exponential organizations, which are able to leverage disruptive technologies to create socioeconomic value, are well positioned in the emerging competitive scenario. Based on a number of internal and external drivers, these organizations can excel within their markets operating as Excelerators, i.e., organizations where people can think and act differently, embrace radical change, and create more sustainable outcomes. This chapter describes the evolution towards crowdventuring and presents the attributes of exponential organizations that act as entrepreneurial accelerators.

In the modern knowledge society, technological entrepreneurship represents a potential engine for the socioeconomic development of regions and territories. Skilled human capital endowed with social attitudes and transversal skills, the open configuration of working environments, and the change attitude of individuals, organizations, and society today represent the complementary factors to the new technologies for the development of a modern entrepreneurial society. Moreover, there is a possibility of access to financial sources that public and private actors decide to reserve for supporting technology entrepreneurship. This constitutes the final element that closes the entire process. It thus allows transforming a smart and innovative idea into a successful company. In particular, it becomes crucial to provide a clear and valuable support to each phase of startup creation (e.g., ideation, validation, build, launch, growth, and maturity), with a specific focus on the financial sources that can be used to implement each phase. In such a perspective, this chapter provides an overview of the main instruments, processes, and actors that can support the development of an entrepreneurial idea and the growth of a startup during the different stages by describing exemplary cases and initiatives of 3Fs funds, public funding, business angels, crowdfunding, venture capital, initial public offerings, corporate venture capital, banks, incubators, and accelerators.

In the current political-economic scenario, creativity and innovation are increasingly considered the key to organizations’ survival. Innovation is a high-risk process that hides various uncertainty factors and several barriers. The key challenge is how to innovate successfully and cope with the pace of innovation, rather than deciding if it is worth innovating or not. We use the notion of entrepreneurability to refer to organizations and individuals’ ability to develop an innovation capacity. In particular, this chapter aims to investigate the role of Innovation Laboratories (Innovation Labs) as an engine of entrepreneurability, e.g., of innovation capacity development. The chapter introduces an understanding of what an Innovation Lab is. It acknowledges that, in recent years, many organizations are experimenting with different forms of labs, centers of competence, and more generally initiatives to boost innovation capacity. Defining the notion of Innovation Lab aims to provide managers with a conceptual framework to understand, from a descriptive and a prescriptive viewpoint, the setup of organizational units and initiatives for innovation capacity development.

Understanding the impact that circular economy can have on the development of innovative entrepreneurship is an interesting but under-researched topic. Despite the growing interest of scholars in business management for trends and scenarios of application of circular economy at level of firms’ business models and dynamics of value creation and capture, exploring its implications and meaning for the conception and execution of innovative entrepreneurship calls for a deeper understanding.

Framed in the above assumptions, the chapter aims to contribute to the advancement of the debate on the meaning and implications of circular economy for innovative entrepreneurship. It presents the results of a structured literature review and provides a theoretical conceptual framework for understanding the relevance of innovative entrepreneurship issues in the light of the circular economy transition.

This chapter aims to contribute to the debate related to entrepreneurship education (EE) within Italian universities. Specifically, it investigates the strategic role of the Italian Contamination Labs (CLabs) created inside some public universities and financed by the MIUR (Italian Ministry of University and Research) as innovative laboratories aimed at developing an entrepreneurial mindset, creativity, and innovation among the university students enrolled in the different degree programs. Through a cross-case study comparison of four Italian CLabs starting in North and South Italy from 2017, it presents the learning approaches and EE methodologies adopted to create an entrepreneurial awareness, mindset, and capability in students with different educational background. Findings demonstrate the crucial role of knowledge contamination in a permanent laboratory where business idea presentation, open innovation challenge, contamination workshop on specialized topics, enterprise projects, and business games are important vehicles for generating future student entrepreneurs and the achievement of the universities’ third mission aim. Implications for practices are delineated in terms of general recommendations that university should adopt according to the Quadruple Helix paradigm.

The central role of innovative entrepreneurship in regional competitiveness is mainly related to its strategic role in generating innovation, thus creating opportunities for improving its socioeconomic system. In this chapter, we focus on the role of Tecnopolis as a case study of hybrid facilitator that supports the development of innovative entrepreneurship. We will describe its strategies and organizational assets. Moreover, we discuss in detail its research, innovation, and education processes, its technical platforms, and its performances in supporting the entrepreneurs that face the challenges proper of innovative start-ups.

In Italy a “second type” of clusters was defined at the beginning of the 2000s with the name of technological district (TD), specialized in high-tech sectors, characterized by a significant interaction between companies and research centers and managed by a legal entity. The technological district changes the perspective and focus of the previous industrial district aggregative model, based on the localization, size scale, and production intensity, passing from the productive sector to the technical-scientific strategic one.

The aim of this chapter is to describe the experience of a district located in Southern Italy and focused on the enabling technology of advanced material.

This intermediate organization in innovation processes, as well as fostering links between scientific research and national, small, medium, and large enterprises, conceives and develops the linking mechanisms between the two worlds emphasizing its territory animation mission, selecting contacts fostering partnerships, providing resources and skills, with the aim of orientating and qualifying the trajectory of regional development toward increasingly higher and more innovative positions.

Its actions to support entrepreneurial capabilities and access to finance and the results obtained in terms of structurally established collaboration networks for co-production and transfer of knowledge between public and private research nodes and the fabric of companies are analyzed.