Narrow Results

The objective of this study is to explore entrepreneurial motivation in a least developed country (LDC), which can be divided into push factors and pull factors, without a priori separation between those which are necessity-driven and those which are opportunity-driven. This study shows that the premise "For people who start their own business in an LDC, push factors are more important than pull factors" can be rejected. In contrast to the findings from prior studies on entrepreneurship in LDCs, this study shows that push factors and pull factors are not mutually exclusive. In addition, this study shows that pull factors are even more important than push factors, and that therefore push factors only play a minor role for entrepreneurs. The overall implications are that motivation is a more combined, and nuanced construct, and that the Western concept of entrepreneurial motivation and method of measuring entrepreneurial motivation, are globally applicable.

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In most developing economies, micro and small enterprises (MSE) and self-employment provide the majority of employment and the main source of income. However, MSE’s potentials often remain exploited and there are high rates of churning. To better understand the limited success of entrepreneurship in developing economies, this paper looks at how entrepreneurs have and use agency and how this relates to their entrepreneurial success. Empirically, we use life history interviews with micro-entrepreneurs in Kampala, Uganda. Conceptually, we draw on Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach, which in regard to agency, emphasizes people’s ambitions, reflected choices, and the various factors that influence how people derive options and agency from available resources. Our results suggest a stronger differentiation of entrepreneurs beyond the ‘necessity vs. opportunity’ dichotomy. This concerns entrepreneurs’ motivations and ambitions, their collective transformative potential and the question of which choices under which restrictions should be conceived of as entrepreneurial agency. Most of the entrepreneurs have and make choices beyond economic survival; self-employment is not just a last resort. It depends on business opportunities not as drivers but as occasions; it may rest on innovative means to access common businesses (rather than on innovative businesses); and it may be directed at sufficiency rather than growth.

In exploring entrepreneurial action as a response to opportunities, this paper uses signalling theory to provide new insights as the entrepreneur moves from perception to recognition to enactment. We adopt a dynamic approach to how entrepreneurs perceive opportunities and form initial opportunity beliefs, recognizing that, over time, beliefs change. The perceived potentialities from the signals arising from opportunities also change. Strength of the initial opportunity beliefs, morph-ability of opportunities, frequency of opportunity appearances, multiple interpretations of opportunity, latency of opportunity, observability (intensity, visibility, strength and clarity), distortions of opportunity and false opportunity are topics that are not sufficiently addressed in research on entrepreneurial opportunities. We argue that the signalling effects open new avenues of inquiry related to the central role of opportunity in the entrepreneurial process. Instead of seeing opportunity from either the discovery or creation approaches, opportunity should be viewed as an artifact with embedded perceived potentialities. Implications are drawn for the developmental context.

In this paper, I examine three questions: (1) how creativity and innovation in organisations are defined in the scientific literature, (2) which theories are applied and hence which explanatory factors have been discussed, and (3) what the empirical evidence is regarding these factors. I uncover an overlap between the definitions of creativity and innovation, which in my view are distinct but related concepts. Further, despite the significant overlap in their definitions, research has evolved in two almost separate streams. Moreover, I observe that the multiple theories used (even regarding the same factor) to explain organisational creativity are not always integrated and that the empirical evidence about factors concerning individuals seems to converge but is much more mixed in relation to factors at the organisational level. Finally, I propose a new definition of organisational creativity and organisational innovation to distinguish them and suggest some avenues for future research.

The obvious current reversion to micro-scale investigations in basic chemical engineering, combined with the need, of a quite different nature, in the rapid growth of high added-value and small-lot functional materials, have been pointing to an area not yet sufficiently covered by the unit operations, transport phenomena and chemical reaction engineering. Although it is difficult to define accurately this area, a cursory scan of the activities already in progress has revealed a few common attributes: multi-phased (structured), multi-scaled, multi-disciplined, nonlinear, needs for resolution to reductionism-solvable subsystems, and pervasive in the process industry. From these activities, the present paper drafts a tentative scheme for studying the related problems: first to dissect a problem into various scales — spatial, temporal or otherwise as best suits the case in hand — in order to identify pertinent parameters which are then organized into model formulations. Together with inter-scale model formulations, a zoom-in/zoom-out process is carried out between the scales, by trial-and-error and through reasoning, to arrive at a global formulation of a quantitative solution, in order to derive, eventually, the general from the particular.

In this paper, I examine three questions: (1) how creativity and innovation in organisations are defined in the scientific literature, (2) which theories are applied and hence which explanatory factors have been discussed, and (3) what the empirical evidence is regarding these factors. I uncover an overlap between the definitions of creativity and innovation, which in my view are distinct but related concepts. Further, despite the significant overlap in their definitions, research has evolved in two almost separate streams. Moreover, I observe that the multiple theories used (even regarding the same factor) to explain organisational creativity are not always integrated and that the empirical evidence about factors concerning individuals seems to converge but is much more mixed in relation to factors at the organisational level. Finally, I propose a new definition of organisational creativity and organisational innovation to distinguish them and suggest some avenues for future research.