Since the 1980s, governments have often sought to encourage entrepreneurship on the assumption that it creates small businesses which are the primary drivers of job creation. Largely because of this assumption, entrepreneurship has become a valid subject for academic research attracting extensive funding. Yet despite this explosion of scholarship, there is no accepted model of how entrepreneurship operates or even a commonly accepted definition of what it is. Simon Bridge posits that this is because entrepreneurship has been studied as if it were a deterministic science, based on the false assumption that it exists as a specific discrete identifiable phenomenon operating in accordance with consistent, predictable 'rules'. This challenging book contends that this misdirected search has produced more questions than answers. Accepting that entrepreneurship as we have conceived it does not exist could lead to new and valuable insights into what the different forms of entrepreneurship are and how they might be influenced. Scholars, advanced students and policy makers will find this a thought-provoking insight into the myths and misconceptions of 'entrepreneurship'.

This book develops a novel industry emergence framework to explain the features, interaction, and synchronization of key elements for the birth and growth of new industries. Organized around seven elements-firm strategy, technology, investment, supply networks, production, markets, and government-Theyel's framework provides inventors, managers, investors, scholars, and policymakers with a comprehensive understanding of how industries emerge, helping them to be more successful at influencing the birth and growth of new industries. Understanding industry emergence is important because new industries can offer the advancement of technology, improvements in human health and the environment, growth of firms, creation of jobs, and economic development. With learning objectives, theory, tools, case studies, and end-of-chapter questions, Industry Emergence will be a useful resource for students and professionals in engineering, science, business, and policy.

Buying decision making is a complicated process, in which a consumer's decision is under the influence of others. The buyer's decision making is directed in such a way that they must act as a consumer in society. Media and family are key socializing agents for adolescents. Moreover, changes in the socio-cultural environment in India necessitate that adolescents' influence in family's buying decision making should be investigated. In comparison to Western society, Indian society is quite different when compared in terms of family composition and structure, behavior, values and norms which impact adolescents' buying decision making. Adolescents, Family and Consumer Behaviour studies the role of consumer socialization agents for adolescents, examining socio-economic factors that influence adolescents' buying decision making in Indian urban families. It aims to discover the influence tactics that adolescents employ and to qualitatively analyse how marketers in turn influence adolescents. It addresses the topics with regard to strategic management and marketing and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of management, entrepreneurship, small business management, and human resource management.

* Proven, highly original career advice from an accomplished writer and entrepreneur * Unique lessons on life, creativity and professionalism that can be applied to establish and successfully operate an independent communications consultancy from anywhere in the world - or to leverage PR expertise in any personal or professional venture * Exclusive insights encapsulating all facets of business and the strategic communications skillset proven to underwrite success

Plastics have occupied an important place in the modern medical industry. It has substituted traditional devices and products made of metal, other materials, and ceramics. Over recent years, increased reliance on transparent plastic pharmaceutical and medical products has produced remarkable breakthroughs that improve medical attention delivery and allow it to be more comfortable for the masses to live better and longer lives. The purpose of this handbook is to provide a strategic perspective on the market to identify opportunities for growth and promising niches in the medical plastics market. It also helps in analyzing emerging trends in medical plastics to facilitate new product development. The medical plastics market is a new field with a broad scope and unending opportunities for manufacturers and suppliers and medical practitioners from healthcare. With a combination of the right material and technology, it has a lot to offer to the patients with affordable pricing. By keeping the worth of the medical plastics market in mind, we have set some objectives. This book identifies growth factors in the medical plastics market and analyzes critical factors of success to compete. The author presents background on the medical plastics market by its usage, products, processes, and innovation. He also reviews existing studies on the medical plastics market for topics like market size, market growth, segment growth, and geographic markets.

Practicing business with a conscience leaves no sector untouched. It trickles into how we treat our employees; approach our work in general; address stakeholders; engage in accounting, financial, and production management practices; implement and manage information technology; communicate on a direct and indirect basis; and market what we stand for. Business has encountered an interesting evolution in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, with social media as a catalyst aiding greater understanding and improvement regarding the critical value of soft skills, workplace diversity, change readiness, moral responsibility, sustainable awareness, and a general socially responsible mindset. This amalgamate spirit of business as we envision it in both the near and far future has found its way in all segments of business education, research, and practice. Adhering to the global trend of increased responsibility and evoking a constructive change in the narrative of business, this Research Companion serves as a critical reference work for business scholars and practitioners in various settings. It brings together contributing scholars from multiple business areas, from a variety of cultures and locations of the world, in order to achieve the compilation of a reference work that will find an expansive appeal. Including insights from the broad business spectrum ranging from internal managerial practices to strategic applications, including international sensitivity, this volume highlights the urgency for increased awareness in business decision-making on all fronts. It will be of great value to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of corporate social responsibility, business ethics, leadership, organizational studies, and entrepreneurship.

Supporting employee entrepreneurship is among major challenges contemporary organizations face. Many facets of corporate entrepreneurship are investigated, and the body of knowledge in the field is growing rapidly; nevertheless, there are still knowledge and research gaps to be filled. Notably, while there are studies linking HRM with corporate entrepreneurship, studies on connections between CSR-oriented practices and corporate/employee entrepreneurship are to be developed. The main goal of this book is to explain relationships between corporate volunteering and employee entrepreneurship in organisations. The book combines two extremely vivid fields of research: entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility. Based on their own research, the authors present how participation in corporate volunteering, as one of the CSR practices in organisations, leads to strengthening employee entrepreneurial behaviour. The book offers a framework showing the role of CSR practices in shaping entrepreneurial and innovative employees' behaviour. This book is aimed mainly at postgraduates, researchers and academics in the fields of entrepreneurship and corporate volunteering. As it touches vital fields of managerial education and management, it will also be of interest to master level students at universities or business schools as well as business practitioners.

Covers the largest scope of developing, emerging and transition economies (DETE). Investigates a full set of factors including context, financial strategy, innovation and performance of firms in DETE. Looks at both the challenges and opportunities of entrepreneurship, finance, innovation and development in DETE. Provides insightful business and policy implications. Contributions come from researchers and practitioners around the world, who focus on entrepreneurial finance, innovation and developmental issues of DETE in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America.

Systems Analysis and Design, Eighth Edition offers a practical, visually appealing approach to information systems development.

This book investigates the formation, configuration and consolidation of elites amongst Kenya's Maasai. The Maasai ethnic group is one of the world's most anthropologized populations, but research tends to focus on what appears to be their dismal situation, analysing how their culture hinders or challenges modern ideas of economic and political development. This book instead focuses on the Maasai men and women who rise to the position of elites, overcoming the odds to take on positions as politicians, professors, CEOs, and high-end administrators. The twenty-first century has seen new opportunities for progression beyond the social reproduction of family wealth, with NGOs, missionaries, tourists and researchers providing new sources of global capital flows. The author, who is Maasai herself, demonstrates the diverse local, national, and global resources and opportunities which lead to social mobility and elite formation. The book also shows how female elites have been able to navigate a patriarchal society in their journey to attaining and maintaining elite status. This book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of anthropology, political science, international development, sociology, and African studies.

In many countries, business practitioners, policy makers, pundits and laypeople want to know how strong China really is in business. In the preceding century, the overall tone of business comments on China was filled with fanfare and ovation. However, despite economic performance and seemingly inexorable growth, some global data in areas such as labour productivity and digital competitiveness, show a different and more nuanced picture. This collection provides a multi-level reality check on the Chinese economy, firm performance and managerial ties. Given that China must transform its economy and business that can pull global talent together to produce high-end technologies for radically innovative products and services, this book proposes two questions. First, can China restructure its economy from a low-cost growth model to a high value-added innovative model without incurring major structural inertia? Second, can Chinese firms outperform competitors in global high value markets without relying on state initiatives, central funding mechanisms and public R&D institutions? This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Asia Pacific Business Review.

The world changes like the patterns in a kaleidoscope: trends expand, contract, break up, melt, disintegrate and disappear, while others are formed. Change - as opposed to stasis - is our normal condition, the only certainty in our lives, hence the need to create tools that provide organizations with the means to tackle change and navigate complexity. We must accept the reality of constant change and be prepared for a heavy shift in perspective: interconnection versus separation, acceleration versus linearity and discontinuity versus continuity. Anticipating the future requires more than the traditional predictive models (forecasting) based on the forward projection of past experiences. Advanced methods use anticipation logic (foresight) and build probable scenarios taking into account weak signals, emerging trends, coexisting presents and potential paths of evolution. Corporate foresight is fundamental to interpret and lead change. The two cornerstones of foresight are organization and management. As concerns organization, the authors advocate the separation of research (oriented to the market of tomorrow) from development (oriented to the market of today), the establishment of a foresight unit and the concentration of research activities mainly on the acquisition and recombination of external know-how. As regards management, after an overview of state-of-the-art literature on forecasting methods, the authors propose the implementation of a "future coverage" methodology, which enables companies to measure and verify the consistency between trends, strategic vision and offered products. These organizational and managing tools are then tested in a case study: the Italian company Eurotech SpA, a leader in the ICT sector.

For decades, outsourcing has been a major international phenomenon in business. The areas of Technology, Information Technology and Management represent a unique case for outsourcing both in terms of benefits and potential interorganisational problems. This fully updated text has been brought up to date with this new landscape, including discussion of Robotic Process Automation, Internet of Things, cloud computing, low code and DevOps and agile. With a range of new global case studies in manufacturing, logistics, chemical industry and cloud services, this textbook offers a strong grounding in real-world industrial experience that effectively combines theory with practice. Uniquely, this book focuses on both sides of the outsourcing relationship, providing a balanced exploration of the ways in which these partnerships can be managed successfully. Accessible and cutting-edge, the third edition of Managing Information Technology Outsourcing provides an in-depth, practical perspective on this important and far-reaching challenge in information technology management. It is an ideal text for students, academics and practitioners alike.

Whilst other countries in Asia particularly China and India have been studied in terms of entrepreneurial endeavours, there is a lack of research on Indonesia despite it being amongst the fastest growing economies in the world. Indonesia is also one of the largest recipients of venture capital in Asia. This book looks at the growth of entrepreneurship in Indonesia from artisan and cultural endeavours to an increased awareness of digital and technology-based forms of entrepreneurship. The book examines the distinct cultural heritage of people in Indonesia towards entrepreneurial pursuits and analyses the role family and minority businesses play in the development of entrepreneurial capabilities. It stresses the need to focus on more categories of entrepreneurship in Indonesia such as artisan, tourism and sustainability in order to facilitate the growth of digital-based startups. This book will be amongst the first to explore how Indonesia is leaping ahead of competitors in its quest to be a dominant world power through its entrepreneurial pursuits.

This book explores the philanthropy of Brazilian elites during a key period in recent Brazilian history, from Workers Party president Lula's last term in office through to the election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. Against this backdrop of political upheaval, the book asks what philanthropy can reveal about the role of corporate and wealth elites in upholding the structures of socioeconomic inequality that continue to define Brazilian society. The book argues that around the world the private sector's growing engagement in international development has led to the emergence of a global philanthropic project centred on practices of "philanthrocapitalism" and "social finance," which ultimately seeks to legitimise global capitalism and the elite interests it serves. Drawing on an in-depth and wide-ranging ethnographic study among philanthropists and their advisors in over 30 Brazilian foundations and intermediary organisations, the book combines a structural critique of the capitalist ideologies underlying philanthropic practice with a robust exploration into the ways in which wealthy Brazilians appropriate philanthropy directly to legitimise elite reproduction and the accumulation of wealth. Researchers across Latin American studies, development studies and the anthropology of development will find this book a timely contribution to the under-researched areas of elite studies and the study of philanthropy.

This book investigates women as business owners in emerging markets, documenting the structural difficulties they face as a result of their seeking access to global supply chains, and demonstrating the ways in which they are rewriting norms and challenging market assumptions. Although women own an estimated one-third of all small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets, they are deeply underrepresented in global supply chains. In what the author refers to as the Women in Trade Deficit, women-owned enterprises earn less than 1% of all money spent on vendors by large corporations and governments worldwide. Drawing on an in-depth empirical investigation of a range of SMEs in Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka, this book investigates how women enter the supply chains of major global firms and multinational corporations and the challenges they face in doing so. Overall, the book argues that these business owners are rewriting norms and rearranging markets through networked enterprises to advance what the author calls prosocial industrialism. Whilst many studies focus on women at the micro-enterprise or laborer level, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of their role at the helm of SMEs that trade internationally. As such, it will be of interest to researchers across business studies, economics, sociology, and development studies, and to donor agencies, policymakers, and the global private sector.

Enterprises located in rural regions face various challenges in the globalised and digitised world. This book offers comprehensive answers to the question of what makes up the rural enterprise economy in the contemporary business world. It addresses the competitiveness and viability, strategic management and strategic change, and marketing issues for both incumbent and start-up companies in rural regions. The book presents new concepts that shed light on the rural enterprise economy with its entrepreneurs. With a broad range of cases from European regions, the book provides theoretical insights for scholars, practical case-based evidence for lecturers and teachers, and practical knowledge for business practitioners and planning specialists. Academic experts from European universities and research institutes provide compelling answers to this under-researched topic in business studies and economics.

* The first book to profile social enterprises in Asia specifically. * Provides the honest stories of the ups and downs of setting up and running ten social enterprises in Asia. * Edited by two leading experts in the field.

The aim of this book is to investigate the discursive power of two original, theoretical lenses when applied to real outsourcing arrangements and phenomena. The Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and Foucauldian perspectives are brought to bear on five outsourcing relationships in order to test the application of these discourses to rich qualitative data over the outsourcing contractual life-cycle. This will be the first study illustrating the relevance of Foucauldian concepts of governmentality, discourse and power relations to the study of outsourcing arrangements, and will also incorporate the perspectives of both client and supplier organizations. Using discourse analysis, the objective is to critically deconstruct and provide fresh insight into the normative 'outsourcing' discourse that has grown up around global sourcing practices over the last 30 years.

State-owned enterprises make up roughly 10 percent of the world economy, yet they are woefully understudied. This handbook offers the first synthesis of the topic since the 1980s and offers a comprehensive reference for a generation. The authors provide a detailed explanation of the theory that underpins the expansion of state-owned enterprises in the 21st century. Each chapter delivers an overview of current knowledge, as well as identifying issues and relevant debates for future research. The authors explain how state-owned enterprises are used in both developed and developing countries and offer an insight into complex and fascinating organizations such as the German municipal conglomerates or the multinational companies owned by states. New modes of governance and regulation have been invented to make sure they act in the public interest. This handbook brings together a wealth of international scholars, offering multiple theoretical perspectives to help shape a brave new world. It will be of interest to teachers and students of Economics, Public Administration and Business, academics, established researchers and PhD students seeking rigorous literature reviews on specific aspects of SOEs, as well as practitioners and decision makers in international organizations.

Governments in developed and developing economies have increasingly turned to entrepreneurship and small businesses for economic growth, dynamism and economic and social inclusion. Policies seeking to encourage, support or otherwise influence these forms of economic activity are varied but virtually omnipresent, recommended by organisations such as the OECD and World Bank and implemented by governments of many political ideologies. With a range of activities across government labelled as enterprise policy, it is vital to unpick the different policies, initiatives and interventions and to understand their development in order to subject them to scrutiny and evaluate the actions taken in the name of enterprise. This book provides the first in-depth, historical analysis of enterprise policy in the United Kingdom. Successive UK governments have been particularly active, with the number of initiatives estimated recently at 3000 and expenditure reaching as high as GBP12bn, yet facing continuous criticisms for its use, value or relevance. This historical study of UK enterprise policy represents a case study of different forms of enterprise policy and how they have developed, or failed to develop, over time, contributing to understanding of government, small business and entrepreneurship. It will be of value to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students interested in the history of small business and entrepreneurship as well as standing as a history of a specific policy area and the ways in which policies involving many different areas of government develop over time.

For consultants, facilitators or OD specialists, a house's familiar image will help their clients see, think and feel their ways solving their business issues. No need for dry and hard-to-remember management schemas. The striking visual and active methods shown here deeply engage clients - they get it right away. The House and its 'Rooms' make sense to them, and they willingly start working with you. The Our House model has many of these 'Rooms' where complex business issues are sorted into one area at a time. The focus, the mood and the process vary with each Room, and the author reveals an entirely original consulting process each time. Disciplined creativity begins: loosening the grip of the past in the Attic; testing business foundations in the Cellar; preparing a meal the customer would love in the Kitchen; suppliers, maintenance and low-hanging fruit in the Garden; the team's dirty washing in the Laundry; elimination and waste goes into the Toilet; frank talk and vision alignment take place at the Dining Table; big systems perspectives can be seen from the Balcony; analysis in the Study; conversation and connection in the Living Room. The simplicity of the images of a House and its Rooms belies their frugality and their strength. In each Room, your clients are put through something demanding yet liberating. They see things differently and they see different things. Our House shows you how to succeed with simple action methods that are enlightening and strong.

Presents how to create an effective entrepreneurship business plan Provides an overview of various aspects of entrepreneurship, function and the contemporary forms Offers a real-world understand of the entrepreneurial world with new analytics thinking and what computational skills are needed for the newer generation in handling big data challenges Encompasses the concepts which an entrepreneur must know before embarking on an entrepreneurial journey Includes inspirational case studies from "Change Leaders".

The economic liberalization in India over the last three decades has provided a wealth of opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to start and expand their businesses. Since the economy opened up in the 1990s, entrepreneurial activity in the private sector has been largely responsible for the strong economic growth experienced in the country. India is presently the world's third largest source of start-ups, and was ranked the second most entrepreneurial country in the world in the recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, ahead of large economic powerhouses such as the United States, China and the UK. Entrepreneurship in India looks at the dynamic and changing nature of entrepreneurship in India. The book examines the history of entrepreneurship in India, different entrepreneurship models adopted, the entrepreneurial ecosystem and looks at the future of entrepreneurship in the country. This book will benefit businesspeople, policy makers and researchers looking to understand more about entrepreneurship in India, and offers guidance to foreign businesses looking to engage with entrepreneurs in India.

Corruption and the Russian Economy examines why the number of entrepreneurs is declining so rapidly in contemporary Russia, how many economic opportunities are being irrevocably lost each year because of administrative corruption, and why entrepreneurship has become one of the most dangerous occupations in the country over the last decade. Based on extensive research, including in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and case studies, it reveals a corrupt system of government agencies at both the regional and local levels, and the increasing involvement of public officials in unlawful seizures of businesses. One major conclusion is that the vast majority of informal payments by entrepreneurs to regulatory agencies are made not to achieve illegal advantages, but rather to secure the property rights that they are entitled to under the law.