Researching Digital Entrepreneurship: Current Issues and Suggestions for Future Directions

Abstract

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Digital Entrepreneurship: What is New if Anything?

“…Kreuzer et al’s ‘The Effects of Digital Technology on Opportunity Recognition’ draws on insights from a comprehensive literature review validated by real-world case studies to explain how and why digital technologies alter the way organizations identify new opportunities. Their findings contribute to earlier research that investigated the nature of entrepreneurship enabled by digital technology (von Briel et al 2021 ) by examining digital phenomena through the lens of opportunity recognition theory. The result of their study is a new theoretical model that calls attention to the relationship between digital technology and opportunity recognition.…”

“…First, it is important to discuss the evolution of different technology characteristics and how changes in technology have influenced the study of entrepreneurship. Since uncovering the advantages of Internet technologies in the 1990s, to exploring the role of open source and social media in the 2010s, and now examining the influence of big data and blockchain, the key insight for researchers is that characteristics of digital technologies differ from those inherent in traditional IT (Nambisan 2017 ; von Briel et al 2021 ; Yoo et al 2010 ). Digital technologies (i.e., combinations of technologies related to social, mobile, analytics, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and platforms, (Vial 2019 )) are unique in that re-programmability, homogeneity of data, and self-referential nature yield a different set of entrepreneurial outcomes as they are easier to combine to create innovation (i.e., convergence) and enable unprompted change (i.e., generativity) (Lyytinen et al 2016 ; Yoo et al 2010 ).…”

“…Moving now from the general trends of digital entrepreneurship research to the more specific studies chosen for the Special Issue (for an overview see Table 1 ), the articles draw from varied settings and phenomena and analyze how entrepreneurs are using digital technologies to bring changes in entrepreneurial processes, innovation, competencies, control, financing, institutions and ecosystems (Block et al 2021 ; Cram et al 2016 ; Hoegen et al 2018 ; Nambisan 2017 ; Sussan and Acs 2017 ; Veit et al 2014 ; von Briel et al 2021 ). As lack of conceptual clarity and unclear boundary conditions are common challenges faced by digital entrepreneurship scholars, our chosen set of articles are all conceptual.…”

“…Our motivation in producing this Special Issue was to study whether established assumptions underpinning entrepreneurship theories still hold in the digital age, i.e., during the emergence and impacts of digital technology and related opportunities (Berger et al 2021 ; Block et al 2020 ; Steininger 2019 ; von Briel et al 2021 ). Inspired by the focus of Business & Information Systems Engineering to examine problems related to the development, implementation and management of information systems, we propose to contextualize principles of digitalization to the entrepreneurship field.…”

Eras of Digital Entrepreneurship

“…Finally, we examined how the research field of digital entrepreneurship might evolve in the future based on the current literature (Schryen 2013 ; Recker et al 2019 ). To do so, we analyzed relevant calls for papers and special issues (Block et al 2020 ; Berger et al 2021 ), as well as articles with suggestions for future research in the field of digital entrepreneurship (Recker and von Briel 2019 ; von Briel et al 2021 ). We identified, among others, three major developments – artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and big data analytics – that might lead to new research opportunities and could influence the terms used in future digital entrepreneurship research.…”