Digital Entrepreneurship: Sustaining the Bridge between Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue takes inspiration from some recent articles (e.g., Nambisan, 2017; Zaheer et al., 2019; Piñeiro-Chousa et al., 2020) presenting the topic of digital entrepreneurship as a relatively new concept/discipline at the intersection of innovation and entrepreneurship that has been gaining momentum thanks to the increasing diffusion of digital technologies.

Digital entrepreneurship is defined as “the process of creating a digital startup as a new business or within an established firm” (Zaheer et al., 2019, p. 2), where a digital startup is seen as a young firm in which at least one of the business model building blocks is enabled by digital technologies (Zaheer et al., 2019). Therefore, digital entrepreneurship is a branch of entrepreneurship that has to do with the new way of creating and doing business in the digital age (Kraus et al., 2019; Le Dinh et al., 2018). On such grounds, research on digital business models has recently expanded (e.g., Giones and Brem, 2017; Kuester et al., 2018), with digital platforms playing a major role (e.g., Hsieh and Wu, 2018). What is stressed by entrepreneurship driven by digital technologies is the role played by users and agents, due to the demand-side–driven business feature of digitalization that places value at the core of business, (Sussan and Acs, 2017; Song, 2019). This paves the way to an ecosystem approach toward digital entrepreneurship, which may assume a local, national or global level.

Despite the recent attention this field has attracted, its interdisciplinary nature, and the escalation of contributions, depth is missing (Zaheer et al., 2019), and there are still many interesting avenues to be explored. The risks associated to digital entrepreneurship, mainly due to the rapid technological advancement digital entrepreneurs have to keep pace with (Srinivasan and Venkatraman, 2018), and the importance of finding the right investors to sustain the business, further contribute to make this field a fertile ground for future research.

On this basis, the purpose of this Special Issue is to increase our knowledge of digital entrepreneurship with the aim of shedding light on the most promising paths and allowing a systematic development of the field. To this end, we are interested in contributions that are related but not limited to the following topics:

• Definition, scope, and boundaries of digital entrepreneurship;
• Alternative methodological approaches (e.g., action research, longitudinal studies) to provide deeper details of the phenomenon and produce practice-driven insights;
• New theories on how start-ups are founded and managed based on the distinctive features of digital technologies, along a digital technology perspective (Nambisan, 2017);
• Venture capital and digital start-ups;
• Competences and assets that digital start-up founders need;
• The relationship between specificities of digital technologies and digital entrepreneurship process and outcomes;
• Digital entrepreneurial ecosystems;
• How specific forms of knowledge facilitate digital entrepreneurship;
• Success and failure of digital start-ups.

Prof. Dr. Anna Nosella
Dr. Lara Agostini
Guest Editors

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• digital entrepreneurship
• digital technologies
• start-up
• business model