Senior entrepreneurship is often seen as a potential way to address societal challenges arising from an ageing population. Drawing on gerontological research on active ageing and prior studies on senior entrepreneurship, we propose that three key capacities associated with active ageing - health, psychological, and financial - affect senior entrepreneurship at the population level. Our analysis of senior entrepreneurship rates across 37 countries between 2001 and 2021 reveals that these capacities are positively associated with the prevalence of entrepreneurship among younger seniors (aged 55-64). However, this relationship does not fully extend to older seniors (aged 65+) or to non-senior age groups (aged 18-54). This study offers research and policy implications for senior entrepreneurship.

The term 'external enabler' (EE) is a collective label for non- trivial changes to emerging and established organizations' (macro) environment, such as new technologies, regulatory changes, demographic and sociocultural trends, and changes to the natural environment. Two fundamental assumptions of EE scholarship are that all such changes benefit some organizations, and that different types of change can offer similar benefits and potentials for strategic action. The external enabler framework (EEF) develops structure and vocabulary to guide cumulative knowledge development across different types of such environmental changes to inspire and guide research and practice regarding strategic and fortuitous leveraging of EEs in entrepreneurial pursuits. Citation statistics and a growing number of applications and exten- sions suggest that the EEF has been well received, and its application area has expanded well beyond its original domain of independent business startups to also include mission-oriented ventures, new initiatives and growth of established organizations of all sizes and ages, and the creation or rejuvenation of industries, ecosystems, and local economies. In this monograph, we update and elaborate on the EEF and review the scholarship that has evolved around it to take stock of past developments and guide and inspire future research and practice in this important domain.

External enabler (EE) is a collective label for any kind of non-trivial environmental change – such as new technologies, regulatory changes, demographic and sociocultural trends, macroeconomic swings, and changes to the natural environment. These enablers can vary in terms of their characteristics and cause-effect relationships, but they serve as important stimuli for launching entrepreneurial initiatives as well as persistent factors in shaping the development of and outcomes from these initiatives. To date, scholars have examined EE issues across several levels of analysis including the firm, industry, ecosystem, and overall economy levels. 

We conducted a three-step replication of Davidsson and Honig's study on the roles of human and social capital in venture creation processes. First, we attempted an exact replication to rule out mistakes and questionable manipulations influencing the original results. Second, we included the initial stage of development as an additional control variable, reflecting on updates suggested in later research. Third, we extended the original analyses using a sample from a different spatiotemporal context, enhancing theoretical generalizability. We largely validate D&H's findings, highlight the importance of modeling initial entrepreneurial processes, and emphasize the underappreciated complexities and value of replication studies.

University technology transfer has garnered significant attention in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship. Most research has focused on the overall performance of entire universities or their technology transfer offices. This study aims instead to contribute to the literature by evaluating performance and its determinants at the level of individual research centers. By promoting continuous engagement between researchers and external stakeholders these centers facilitate the co-creation of projects with a translational impact. Despite being critical channels for advancing publicly funded technology transfer, research centers have received limited attention in previous studies. To address this gap, we examine the technology transfer efficiency (TTE) of 46 innovation-driven university research centers funded by the Australian Research Council from 2013 to 2021. Combining traditional data envelopment analysis with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, we assess these centers' TTE and identify configurations for high and low TTE outcomes. Our findings reveal respectable performance levels across most research centers; however, significant inefficiencies are related to Master's and PhD students, and collaborations with external stakeholders. We outline three configurations leading to high TTE, and five configurations for low TTE. Notably, our results highlight the pivotal role of female directors in technology transfer leadership, which significantly contributes to high TTE. Additionally, inefficiencies arise when engaging with multiple external stakeholders and in the utilization of research students and postdoctoral researchers as factors in configurations linked to low TTE. These results highlight the complex causality underlying the technology transfer process and provide implications for research policy and the functioning of research centers.

The creation of sustainable industries is widely regarded as one of the most pressing issues in policymaking and research alike. The growing scholarly work in this field so far mostly highlights agent-focused perspectives, such as how value-driven agents individually and collectively create significant and lasting change. We complement such studies by addressing the underlying business-environmental conditions that make participation in such industry creation attractive and potentially successful. Accordingly, we apply the external enablement (EE) framework to address how sociocultural, technological, and regulatory changes to the business environment, as external enablers, can contribute to the creation of a sustainability-oriented industry, the empirical example being the ongoing, potential creation of a viable automotive plastic recycling industry in Australia. We find that while all three types of enablers have important roles, their direct influence on shaping entrepreneurial action in this domain varies. While the value-based sociocultural pressure toward sustainability may have a fundamental role in driving global technology development and regulations toward sustainability, the microlevel agents concerned are variously driven by such concerns and stress much more the need for regulatory measures to make sustainability investments commercially attractive. By applying the EE framework to an ongoing case of industry (rather than just venture) creation, we develop insights about the varying controllability and proximal–distal qualities of external enablers. Further, we find that it is imperative that external enablement is sufficient across all significant types of agents in the emerging industry. To capture the latter, we add the concept of EE coverage. These are valuable new insights for future EE scholarship. By studying an ongoing case of industry creation where the actions of a values-driven coalition of microlevel agents do not seem to suffice as a primary driver of the industry creation process, we contribute important insights to literatures on sustainability entrepreneurship and industry creation about business-environmental influences as complement to the well-established, agent-focused notion of collective action as crucial in processes of industry creation.

Although past research has firmly established the positive effects of network status for resource acquisition and success in entrepreneurial endeavors, we still have a fragmented, limited understanding of the actual drivers of network status emergence. Prior research has mainly focused on the post-founding phase, pointing to the importance of current employment–based and firm-level affiliations in new ventures for their future status formation. In this paper, we extend the attention to the pre-founding phase in a study of spinoffs. Building on imprinting and signaling theories, we theorize that coming from a highly reputable parent firm has a long-term positive impact on a spinoff’s subsequent status by signaling a young spinoff firm’s quality to external parties. We advance previous research by further theorizing that such imprinting is contingent on the level of knowledge relatedness between the parent and spinoff as well as on whether there exists a strategic alliance between them post-founding. In addition, we argue a positive three-way interaction among parent reputation, parent-spinoff knowledge relatedness, and the parent-spinoff strategic alliance. Our analysis of a comprehensive longitudinal sample of 162 Australian mining spinoffs (i.e., firms started by ex-employees of incumbent parent firms) and 3405 strategic alliances from 2001 to 2014 supports majority of our hypotheses.

We tested the drivers of spinoffs' (that is, new firms started by ex-employees of incumbent firms) alliance network size through the lens of imprinting theory, using a large longitudinal sample of 145 newly founded spinoffs and 3,405 strategic alliances from 2001 to 2014 in the alliance-intensive mining industry. Our results revealed that whereas parent firms' network positions in terms of size and centrality leave an influential early imprinting effect on spinoffs' alliance network size, initial partners' network position leaves an effect through path-dependent forces. Further, our analysis revealed that the parent's network characteristics can influence the choice of initial partner. We discuss implications for alliance network emergence, spinoffs, and imprinting theory.

This article shows how small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can enhance the level of corporate entrepreneurship through alliance management capabilities. The findings from a sample of 272 suppliers to the mining industry demonstrate that the constituting dimensions of alliance portfolio management capability (that is, partnering proactiveness, relational governance, and portfolio coordination) positively affect corporate entrepreneurship. Moreover, corporate entrepreneurship mediates the effects of these dimensions on firm performance. These findings improve our understanding of how organizational capabilities enable SMEs to mitigate their lack-of-resources problem while engaging in interfirm relationships to better utilize corporate entrepreneurship for increasing firm performance.

In recent years, the notion of a unicorn, a startup exceeding a premarket valuation of one billion USD, has become one of the most prominent concepts in the practical discourse of entrepreneurship. Consequently, entrepreneurs aim to build unicorns, investors want to participate in their success, policymakers strive to support their emergence, and educators present them as an ideal-type entrepreneurial activity. We challenge this view with a provocative critique of the positive mainstream perception of unicorns. First, we characterize unicorns as an ambiguous analytical category with little value for research and evidence-based policy. Second, we point to the danger of neglecting the multifaceted nature of entrepreneurship by focusing solely on extreme outliers. Third, we highlight the potentially unethical consequences of entrepreneurship's obsession with unicorns. Finally, we conclude that focusing on unicorns contributes to a biased picture of entrepreneurship that favors valuation (i.e., the unicorn) over value creation (i.e., productive entrepreneurship).