Narrow Results

This paper presents the initial results of a project to investigate the organizational antecedents of entrepreneurship at public research and technology institutions (RTIs) in Iran. In line with the policies of the government to increase the role of publicly funded R&D in solving the problems of domestic industry, the research centers within public RTIs are encouraged to direct their research efforts towards practical applications, thus creating value from their R&D efforts. We chose to utilize a widely-used construct from corporate entrepreneurship literature (Entrepreneurial Orientation, EO) to explain undeniable differences among these research centers in their success in academic entrepreneurship. Noting that EO is a context-sensitive construct, the items to measure EO in research centers were generated by in-depth interviews; and the relationship between the contextualized EO and financial performances of research centers was investigated. The results confirmed a notable association between the EO level of research centers and their financial performance.

In an exploratory inquiry, involving informants in 19 global manufacturing companies in six sectors of the process industries, ideation, and concept integration during the pre-development of non-assembled products was studied. New and previously deployed constructs and concepts related to innovation in a process-industrial context have initially been developed, refined, and empirically tested. The findings demonstrate the importance of an early integration of constructs and concepts for raw material innovation, innovation-related process technology, and product innovation, as a prerequisite for successful ideation of new or improved products in the process industries. Companies in different sectors of the process industries can implement and use the novel “integrated framework” for contextualization and conceptualization of new product ideas in their development or reconfiguration of an enhanced work process for non-assembled products.

Why does South Africa underperform on benchmarks for nascent entrepreneurship? We use a contextualization framework to evaluate articles on entrepreneurship in South Africa, which appear in seven leading global entrepreneurship journals for the period 1986–2017. The literature is then discussed using a six-dimension contextualization framework. The historical and institutional dimensions of the contextualization framework unveil the path-dependent nature of entrepreneurial choice for Black South Africans. Understanding entrepreneurship in South Africa requires research designs that focus on where and when entrepreneurship developed in the country to render meaningful the why of entrepreneurial choices made by Black South Africans. This study illustrates the idiosyncratic nature of South Africa and its social, political and economic transitions, and how these have affected entrepreneurship development, particularly among previously disadvantaged Black South Africans. The nature of the South African case has broader impact and importance for developing and transitional economies.