Female entrepreneurship is a growing trend in transition economies. This article focuses on female entrepreneurs in Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo (hereinafter ALMAKOS) and provides an understanding of current motives, problems and perspectives of female entrepreneurs in this region. Surveys were conducted during the period of January-March 2014 (Macedonia) and May-June 2014 (Albania and Kosovo), to complement secondary sources. The results are reported in terms of the female entrepreneur's personal characteristics, motives for starting a business, the characteristics of their business and operations, the size of the business they run, revenues, their family status, management problems in starting or maintaining their businesses and their self-perceived required competences.

The aim of this article is to investigate the impact of information communication technologies (ICT) and innovation activities on firm performance using the Business Environment Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) firm‐level data in the three rounds: 2002, 2005, and 2008. The novelty of this research is based on the idea of studying the usage of ICT and innovation activities on firm performance by using dynamic approach so that we can estimate the adjustments that arise from the impact of ICT and innovation activities. The rapid technological development and the growing use of information technology (IT) in business organizations have become the center of attention in past few years. A bulk of literature has been published on the use of IT in different industries, different types of business organizations, and in different areas of business management. On the other hand, the probability of the firm to undertake innovation activities has shown to enhance firm performance. This study implements various estimations on BEEPS observations to test whether the change in the usage of ICT and other innovation determinants have increase the probability of firms to undertake innovation activities. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the impacts of social media on the Pakistani consumers' buying behavior, which could be reflected in either complex buying, variety seeking, dissonance reducing or habitual buying. Entrepreneurs need to know how their loyal and prospective customers feel, think and how do they decide on purchasing certain products and services.Design/methodology/approachThe self-administered online questionnaire is used to collect feedback from consumers in order to analyze the data and come up with the findings. A sample size of 396 respondents was used to analyze and find a relationship between social media and consumer buying behavior.FindingsSocial media is found to have a partially significant impact on Pakistani consumers' buying behavior; word of mouth and content credibility are the two factors that influence Pakistani consumers' buying behavior. Pakistani consumers, below the age of 40, possess more complex buying behavior, which alerts entrepreneurs to consider it for their future marketing strategies.Practical implicationsEntrepreneurs should make an effort to be differentiated from others while keeping customers aware of the products they provide. In addition, customers should not spend too much time when comparing brands; rather, businesses should make it more captive.Originality/valueThis paper provides different results in comparison to the previous studies, in terms of the factors influencing consumers' buying behavior.

Purpose In India, many promotional policies and educational institutions have focused on entrepreneurship education (EE) for the development of future entrepreneurs. Through the survey from a region of Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, this paper aims to study the young community’s entrepreneurial attitude (EA) towards entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach The data was collected from a young community of various universities and colleges in different regions of UP, India to find out that “Does the EE help in developing a positive EA among young community towards entrepreneurship”. Firstly, 23 interviews have been conducted to explore about EE and EA. Further data was collected from 341 respondents through a structured questionnaire and undertaken done with the descriptive analysis: exploratory factor analysis and multiple regression method to explore the result of this study. Findings After the analysis, it was found that EE played an important role in developing EA of the young community towards entrepreneurship. All the coefficients in the regression model are positive, which means that all the factors of EE (awareness, enterprise knowledge and practical skills) have a positive impact on EA (affective, cognitive and behavioural). Practical implications This study provides a futuristic direction to various academic institutes and government organizations on how they prepare future entrepreneurs by inculcating EA among them. Creative minds generate innovative products and services, create jobs, alleviate poverty and maintain the GDP of a nation. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify the relationship between EE and EA with the help of qualitative and quantitative analyses.

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