Alternative modes of entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation : the case on inter-organizational project

While entrepreneurship research has taken firm formation to be the predominant mode of opportunity exploitation, entrepreneurship can take place through many other types of organizational arrangements. In the present article, we consider one such alternative arrangement, namely the formation of inter-organizational projects (IOPs). We propose a multi-level contingency model that suggests that uncertainty both at the level of the firm and at the level of the environment makes the exploitation of opportunities through IOPs more likely. The model is tested by telephone survey data collected amongst a panel of 1725 SMEs and longitudinal industry data. Our findings provide strong support for the industry-level part of the model, but interestingly, only partial support for the firm level part of the model. This indicates that the effects of uncertainty need to be dissected into different levels of analysis to understand the conditions under which alternative modes of opportunity exploitation can be a prominent entrepreneurial alternative to new firm formation.

Turnover in entrepreneurial teams : are spousal teams different?

Entrepreneurial teams are increasingly prevalent. An important stage in new venture formation involves the recruitment and retention of team members, characterised by changes in the membership of the ET. ET turnover involves members joining or leaving the team, which could have positive or negative effects on the team and the firm. Spousal Entrepreneurial Teams (SET) are a frequently occurring, yet unique type of ET, with very distinct characteristics and dynamics. In an SET turnover is likely to be have different meanings and effects than in Other Entrepreneurial Teams. This research asks: What influences members joining and leaving entrepreneurial teams? And are SET different? Using data from 561 young firms over X years, we find significant differences between SET and NSET. Specifically, we find X.

A portrayal of new entrants into the Australian economy (Entrepreneurial individuals and ventures)

This paper provides a descriptive overview of the venture creation in Australia, those who participate in it and the types of firms they build. Findings of interest in this paper include: • The majority of business founders (89 per cent) state the motivation to start a new business is opportunity-driven rather than necessity driven. • The extent of under-representation of women business founders in Australia appears to be lower than international comparisons and has decreased over time. • Australian business founders tend to possess significant ‘human capital’ many are university-educated, and large shares have different types of experience that may benefit the start-up. • The major industries for start-up activities are Retailing; various service industries (Business Consulting; Health, Education and Social; other Consumer services); Construction, Manufacturing, and Agriculture. • A large proportion of CAUSEE respondents (49 per cent nascent firms and 46 per cent young firms) are members of start-up teams, which is similar to international comparisons.

Alternative modes of entrepreneurial opportunity exploitation

While entrepreneurship research has taken firm formation to be the predominant mode of opportunity exploitation, entrepreneurship can take place through many other types of organizational arrangements. In the present article, we consider one such alternative arrangement, namely the formation of inter-organizational projects (IOPs). We propose a multi-level contingency model that suggests that uncertainty both at the level of the firm and at the level of the environment makes the exploitation of opportunities through IOPs more likely. The model is tested by telephone survey data collected amongst a panel of 1725 SMEs and longitudinal industry data. Our findings provide strong support for the industry-level part of the model, but interestingly, only partial support for the firm level part of the model. This indicates that the effects of uncertainty need to be dissected into different levels of analysis to understand the conditions under which alternative modes of opportunity exploitation can be a prominent entrepreneurial alternative to new firm formation.

Designing innovative business models: Five emerging meta-models

Business models to date have remained the creation of management, however, it is the belief of the authors that designers should be critically approaching, challenging and creating new business models as part of their practice. This belief portrays a new era where business model constructs become the new design brief of the future and fuel design and innovation to work together at the strategic level of an organisation. Innovation can no longer rely on technology and R&D alone but must incorporate business models. Business model innovation has become a strong type of competitive advantage. As firms choose not to compete only on price, but through the delivery of a unique value proposition in order to engage with customers and to differentiate a company within a competitive market. The purpose of this paper is to explore and investigate business model design through various product and/or service deliveries, and identify common drivers that are catalysts for business model innovation. Fifty companies spanning a diverse range of criteria were chosen, to evaluate and compare commonalities and differences in the design of their business models. The analysis of these business cases uncovered commonalities of the key strategic drivers behind these innovative business models. Five Meta Models were derived from this content analysis: Customer Led, Cost Driven, Resource Led, Partnership Led and Price Led. These five key foci provide a designer with a focus from which quick prototypes of new business models are created. Implications from this research suggest there is no ‘one right’ model, but rather through experimentation, the generation of many unique and diverse concepts can result in greater possibilities for future innovation and sustained competitive advantage.

Capturing opportunities for business and innovation in knowledge intensive services

Research on opportunity has been extensively studied in contexts of new firm or new venture creation (Choi & Shepherd, 2004; Mullins & Forlani, 2005; Ozgen & Baron, 2007) where start-ups and new ventures use both opportunity discovery and opportunity creation (Alvarez & Barney 2005, 2007). Less research is found on examining the relationship between opportunity and innovation in existing firms (with Drucker (1985) an exception). In large firms, opportunity recognition has been analysed in terms of antecedent conditions, elements and outcomes (Ireland, Covin & Kuratko, 2009), but to date less attention has been given to how small and medium enterprises capture and use opportunities to remain competitive. Little research has been carried out regarding how smaller firms use opportunities to create new business with existing customers or use technological advances with new customers to create new economic activity, growth and competitive advantage. This study presents findings from a comparative case analysis of 20 diverse firms in the spatial information industry and identifies constructs associated with identifying opportunities that lead to better business performance and firm level innovation.

Expertise in Business Process Management

As organizations attempt to become more business process-oriented, existing role descriptions are revised and entire new business process-related roles emerge. A lot of attention is often being paid to the technological aspect of Business Process Management (BPM), but relatively little work has been done concerning the people factor of BPM and the specification of BPM expertise in particular. This study tries to close this gap by proposing a comprehensive BPM expertise model, which consolidates existing theories and related work. This model describes the key attributes characterizing “BPM expertise” and outlines their structure, dynamics, and interrelationships. Understanding BPM expertise is a predecessor to being able to develop and apply it effectively. This is the cornerstone of human capital and talent management in BPM.

Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The aspiration of this book series is to understand some of the common forces behind the disruptions occurring in so many creative industries today and identifying the most promising strategies and responses by organizations to create new value propositions, business models and business practices that can enable these industry participants to cope with and eventually thrive as their industries and sectors are transformed. The chapters included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry. The context for this volume is the publishing industries, understood as the industries for the publishing of fiction and non-fiction books, academic literature, consumer as well as trade magazines, and daily newspapers. This volume includes chapters by an internationally diverse array of media scholars whose chapters provide insights into these phenomena in Eastern Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the United States, using different methodological frameworks including, but not limited to, surveys, in-depth interviews and multiple-case studies. One gap that this book series seeks to fill is that between the study of business innovation and disruption by innovation scholars largely based in business school settings and similar studies by scholarly experts from non-business school disciplines, including the broader social sciences (e.g. sociology, political science, economic geography) and creative industry based professional school disciplines (e.g. architecture, communications, design, film making, journalism, media studies, performing arts, photography and television). Future volumes of this book series will examine disruption and business innovation in the film, video and photography sectors (volume two), the music sector (volume three) and interactive entertainment (volume four), with subsequent volumes focusing on the most relevant developments in creative industry business innovation and disruption that emerge.

Characteristics of spatial variation, size distribution, formation and growth of particles in urban environments

This thesis is the first comprehensive study of important parameters relating to aerosols' impact on climate and human health, namely spatial variation, particle size distribution and new particle formation. We determined the importance of spatial variation of particle number concentration in microscale environments, developed a method for particle size parameterisation and provided knowledge about the chemistry of new particle formation. This is a significant contribution to our understanding of processes behind the transformation and dynamics of urban aerosols. This PhD project included extensive measurements of air quality parameters using state of the art instrumentation at each of the 25 sites within the Brisbane metropolitan area and advanced statistical analysis.

Entrepreneurship education in non-business schools : best practice for Australian contexts of knowledge and innovation communities (Final Report)

In the current era of global economic instability, business and industry have already identified a widening gap between graduate skills and employability. An important element of this is the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates. This Teaching Fellowship investigated two sides of a story about entrepreneurial skills and their teaching. Senior players in the innovation commercialisation industry, a high profile entrepreneurial sector, were surveyed to gauge their needs and experiences of graduates they employ. International contexts of entrepreneurship education were investigated to explore how their teaching programs impart the skills of entrepreneurship. Such knowledge is an essential for the design of education programs that can deliver the entrepreneurial skills deemed important by industry for future sustainability. Two programs of entrepreneurship education are being implemented at QUT that draw on the best practice exemplars investigated during this Fellowship. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS) focuses on capturing the innovation and creativity of students, staff and others. The QIS is a physical and virtual meeting and networking space; a connected community enhancing the engagement of participants. The Q_Hatchery is still embryonic; but it is intended to be an innovation community that brings together nascent entrepreneurial businesses to collaborate, train and support each other. There is a niche between concept product and business incubator where an experiential learning environment for otherwise isolated ‘garage-at-home’ businesses could improve success rates. The QIS and the Q_Hatchery serve as living research laboratories to trial the concepts emerging from the skills survey. The survey of skills requirements of the innovation commercialisation industry has produced a large and high quality data set still being explored. Work experience as an employability factor has already emerged as an industry requirement that provides employee maturity. Exploratory factor analysis of the skills topics surveyed has led to a process-based conceptual model for teaching and learning higher-order entrepreneurial skills. Two foundational skills domains (Knowledge, Awareness) are proposed as prerequisites which allow individuals with a suite of early stage entrepreneurial and behavioural skills (Pre-leadership) to further leverage their careers into a leadership role in industry with development of skills around higher order elements of entrepreneurship, management in new business ventures and progressing winning technologies to market. The next stage of the analysis is to test the proposed model through structured equation modelling. Another factor that emerged quickly from the survey analysis broadens the generic concept of team skills currently voiced in Australian policy documents discussing the employability agenda. While there was recognition of the role of sharing, creating and using knowledge in a team-based interdisciplinary context, the adoption and adaptation of behaviours and attitudes of other team members of different disciplinary backgrounds (interprofessionalism) featured as an issue. Most undergraduates are taught and undertake teamwork in silos and, thus, seldom experience a true real-world interdisciplinary environment. Enhancing the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian industry is essential for the economic health of the country and can only be achieved by addressing the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates from the higher education system. This Fellowship has attempted to address this deficiency by identifying the skills requirements and providing frameworks for their teaching.

Impact of particle formation on atmospheric ions and particle number concentrations in an urban environment

A measurement campaign was conducted from 3 to 19 December 2012 at an urban site of Brisbane, Australia. Size distribution of ions and particle number concentrations were measured to investigate the influence of particle formation and biomass burning on atmospheric ion and particle concentrations. Overall ion and particle number concentrations during the measurement period were found to be (-1.2 x 103 cm-3 | +1.6 x 103 cm-3) and 4.4 x 103, respectively. The results of correlation analysis between concentrations of ions and nitrogen oxides indicated that positive and negative ions originated from similar sources, and that vehicle exhaust emissions had a more significant influence on intermediate/large ions, while cluster ions rapidly attached to larger particles once emitted into the atmosphere. Diurnal variations in ion concentration suggested the enrichment of intermediate and large ions on new particle formation event days, indicating that they were involved in the particle formation processes. Elevated total ions, particularly larger ions, and particle number concentrations were found during biomass burning episodes. This could be due to the attachment of cluster ions onto accumulation mode particles or production of charged particles from biomass burning, which were in turn transported to the measurement site. The results of this work enhance scientific understanding of the sources of atmospheric ions in an urban environment, as well as their interactions with particles during particle formation processes.

Introduction to "Business innovation and disruption in the music industry"

Similar to most other creative industries, the evolution of the music industry is heavily shaped by media technologies. This was equally true in 1999, when the global recorded music industry had experienced two decades of continuous growth largely driven by the rapid transition from vinyl records to Compact Discs. The transition encouraged avid music listeners to purchase much of their music collections all over again in order to listen to their favourite music with ‘digital sound’. As a consequence of this successful product innovation, recorded music sales (unit measure) more than doubled between the early 1980s and the end of the 1990s. It was with this backdrop that the first peer-to-peer file sharing service was developed and released to the mainstream music market in 1999 by the college student Shawn Fanning. The service was named Napster and it marks the beginning of an era that is now a classic example of how an innovation is able to disrupt an entire industry and make large swathes of existing industry competences obsolete. File sharing services such as Napster, followed by a range of similar services in its path, reduced physical unit sales in the music industry to levels that had not been seen since the 1970s. The severe impact of the internet on physical sales shocked many music industry executives who spent much of the 2000s vigorously trying to reverse the decline and make the disruptive technologies go away. At the end, they learned that their efforts were to no avail and the impact on the music industry proved to be transformative, irreversible and, to many music industry professionals, also devastating. Thousands of people lost their livelihood, large and small music companies have folded or been forced into mergers or acquisitions. But as always during periods of disruption, the past 15 years have also been very innovative, spurring a plethora of new music business models. These new business models have mainly emerged outside the music industry and the innovators have been often been required to be both persuasive and persistent in order to get acceptance from the risk-averse and cash-poor music industry establishment. Apple was one such change agent that in 2003 was the first company to open up a functioning and legal market for online music. iTunes Music Store was the first online retail outlet that was able to offer the music catalogues from all the major music companies; it used an entirely novel pricing model, and it allowed consumers to de-bundle the music album and only buy the songs that they actually liked. Songs had previously been bundled by physical necessity as discs or cassettes, but with iTunes Music Store, the institutionalized album bundle slowly started to fall apart. The consequences had an immediate impact on music retailing and within just a few years, many brick and mortar record stores were forced out of business in markets across the world. The transformation also had disruptive consequences beyond music retailing and redefined music companies’ organizational structures, work processes and routines, as well as professional roles. iTunes Music Store in one sense was a disruptive innovation, but it was at the same time relatively incremental, since the major labels’ positions and power structures remained largely unscathed. The rights holders still controlled their intellectual properties and the structures that guided the royalties paid per song that was sold were predictable, transparent and in line with established music industry practices.

Introduction to "Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing"

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries (see preface for extensive discussion of creative industries) respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The papers included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry...

Designing innovative business models with a framework that promotes experimentation

Purpose – Business models to date have remained the creation of management, however, it is the belief of the authors that designers should be critically approaching, challenging and creating new business models as part of their practice. This belief portrays a new era where business model constructs become the new design brief of the future and fuel design and innovation to work together at the strategic level of an organisation. Design/methodology/approach – The purpose of this paper is to explore and investigate business model design. The research followed a deductive structured qualitative content analysis approach utilizing a predetermined categorization matrix. The analysis of forty business cases uncovered commonalities of key strategic drivers behind these innovative business models. Findings – Five business model typologies were derived from this content analysis, from which quick prototypes of new business models can be created. Research limitations/implications – Implications from this research suggest there is no “one right” model, but rather through experimentation, the generation of many unique and diverse concepts can result in greater possibilities for future innovation and sustained competitive advantage. Originality/value – This paper builds upon the emerging research and exploration into the importance and relevance of dynamic, design-driven approaches to the creation of innovative business models. These models aim to synthesize knowledge gained from real world examples into a tangible, accessible and provoking framework that provide new prototyping templates to aid the process of business model experimentation.

Mobile communications : a study of factors influencing consumer use of m-services

New mobile digital communication technologies present opportunities for advertisers to capitalize on the evolving relationships of consumers with their mobile devices and their desire to access enhanced information services while mobile (m-services). Consumers already use mobile devices (cell phones, personal mobile digital assistants) for traditional phone calls and message handling (e.g., Kalakota and Robinson, 2002; Sullivan Mort and Drennan, 2002). The combination of rapidly developing mobile digital technology and high uptake rates of mobile devices presents enormous potential for delivery of m-services through these devices (Bitner, Brown, and Meuter, 2000). M-services encompass a wide variety of types including the ability to trade stock, to book theater and movie tickets while accessing seating plans online, to send and receive text and pictures, and receive personalized direct advertising such as alerts for shopping bargains. Marketing communications, and specifically advertising, may be delivered as an m-service and termed m-services advertising, forming part of the broader category of m-services. However, advertising research has not yet addressed the area of m-services and needs to do so to be able to take advantage of the advanced interactivity (Yadav and Varadarajan, 2005) of mobile communication devices. Such advertising research is likely to help develop open attitudes and responses to new business models as has been advocated for other new technology such as advanced television (Tauder, 2005). In this article, we model the factors influencing the use of m-services, in the context of consumers' existing relationships with mobile devices. First, we address the value propositions underpinning consumer involvement with mobile devices. Next, we canvass the types of involvement relevant to this consumption domain and argue that involvement, together with personal attributes innovativeness and self-efficacy, will influence use of m-services. Finally, implications for advertising delivered as an m-service are discussed, the potential for m-services advertising as part of m-commerce are canvassed, and directions for future research identified.