This important book considers the ways in which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can thrive in the age of big data. To address this central issue from multiple viewpoints, the editors introduce a collection of experiences, insights, and guidelines from a variety of expert researchers, each of whom provides a piece to solve this puzzle. Contributions address the limitations faced by SMEs in their access to data and demonstrate that the key to overcoming this issue is to be aware of these limitations, to work within them, and to use them to think creatively about how to overcome obstacles in new ways. They discuss Artificial Intelligence, revenue blueprinting, GDPR compliance, and other key topics related to the relationships between SMEs and data. Offering ideas to inspire big data-driven success by SMEs making smaller investments, the book argues that there must be a place for "ordinary" data-driven journeys that are available to firms of any size. Stimulating further thought and action, Big Data in Small Business will be of great interest to academics, researchers, and practitioners in areas such as strategic management, organizational and innovation studies, marketing, and sales. The ideas and information in this book will help fill knowledge gaps related to important aspects of capabilities, functions, and transformations of big data that drive business growth.

This timely book takes both a practical and academic perspective of innovation in sport management, exploring the role of entrepreneurship in sport. With its interdisciplinary approach, it provides a holistic overview of the ways in which sport is both innovative and entrepreneurial. Expert contributors examine how technological advances, scientific approaches, digitalization and tournament design shape, or are shaped by, entrepreneurial ventures in sport management. Chapters also discuss the implications of the coronavirus pandemic for the sports industry, analysing how sport entities and managers have had to be innovative in order to adapt to the new market and unpredictable societal conditions created by the pandemic. The book reflects on the importance of innovation for sport management, highlighting the need for futuristic thinking as sports organisations try to develop better practices. Offering practical examples of entrepreneurship in sport, this book will be a useful resource for scholars and students of sports, sport management and management education. It will also be beneficial for sports practitioners and managers focusing on organisational innovation and how to navigate crises.

Entrepreneurs build businesses to fulfil dreams for themselves, their families, their employees and their community. Their business lives therefore have an impact on a wide range of people. Entrepreneurial skills focuses on the essential concepts and skills needed to grow and manage a business successfully. Entrepreneurial skills presents current, relevant content in unique and interesting ways. It draws from real-world examples to introduce the reality of the entrepreneurial life so that the reader will better understand his or her motivations for starting a business and avoid distorted concepts about what is required to be an effective business owner. Entrepreneurial skills will equip undergraduates at universities and universities of technology as well as practising entrepreneurs to deal with the challenges and develop the necessary skills for running a business.

This book presents a unique collection of case studies from across the globe to create a comprehensive understanding of how family firms can respond to future disruptions. Each case contains learning notes with objectives, discussion questions and suggested readings to facilitate learner understanding and engagement with the topic. Cases on topics such as global succession and governance practices will aid strategic decision-making capabilities in family businesses and will also benefit practitioners in these areas. Diverse in terms of generational involvement, demographic groups, cultural aspects, institutional settings and industries, the cases range from founder-led SMEs to multi-generational family conglomerates in 18 countries spanning over four continents. In addition to identifying successful practices, this book offers unconventional wisdom on the impact of family feuds, sudden death, divorce and multiple marriages on family businesses. It concludes by exposing new understandings on succession and the unique role played by rising-generation leaders in this disruptive era. Informed by the common research paradigm of the Successful Transgenerational Entrepreneurship Practice (STEP) Project Global Consortium, this book will provide a practical learning experience for advanced students and scholars of family business, family entrepreneurship, and strategic management studies.

Ethnography is at the heart of what researchers in management and organization studies do. This crucial book offers a robust and original overview of ''doing'' organizational ethnography, guiding readers through the essential qualitative methods for the study of organizations. Preparing students to enter the field with a confident outlook and a toolkit of skills, chapters present a series of action-learning projects to arm readers with practical exercises that will hone the abilities of the organizational ethnographer. Expert contributors offer crucial outlines into a variety of essential skills, including shadowing, autoethnography, interviews, media analysis and storytelling. The book concludes with a chapter by a doctoral student, providing unique insights into the development of the ethnographic understanding of organizational realities. Featuring useful exercises and an accessible style, this book is critical reading for PhD and Masters students in business administration and organizational theory, as well as social science students undertaking qualitative methodology programmes. It will also be useful for students on MBA courses in need of a humanistic approach to organizations.

The No#1 Marketing Book for Local Trades. If you are a local trades or service based business this is for you...Whether you are an electrician, a plumber, gas engineer, carpet cleaner, handyman or gardener, this easy-to-implement, proven six-step system is designed to position you as the go-to person in your area for the service you provide. It doesn't matter if you are starting out or have been trading for years, the SPARKS Blueprint(TM) can help boost your business, find new customers and keep them.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This exciting Research Agenda offers a multi-disciplinary and historically informed programme for the further investigation of the global political economy of the corporate sector. It tackles the question, can and should the corporation be reformed? Christopher May develops a range of intersecting areas for research while also offering an account of the possibilities for the reform of the global corporation. Based on an understanding of the history of corporations, the author provides key insights into their management and political agency as well as the operation of the global corporate supply chain. Drawing links between a range of disciplines and perspectives on business enterprises, May calls for a more nuanced understanding of the global corporate sector in order to better comprehend the contours of the contemporary global capitalist system. This Research Agenda will be a valuable resource for students and academics of politics, economics, sociology and law, who are curious to explore the corporation in relation to their area of study.

Entrepreneurship is a dynamic process constantly evolving through innovation, in that entrepreneurs devise profitable products and services that did not previously exist. This process requires entrepreneurs to have major skills in different business areas.

This book is about entrepreneurship in the South African business environment, and about the entrepreneurial process. It highlights three main aspects, namely: the entrepreneurial part of starting and running a business; the marketing of products and services; and the financial aspects of a profitable and sustainable business.

Key Aspects:

• Entrepreneurship
• Marketing
• Finance

Dynamics of Entrepreneurship is aimed at undergrad students in the field as well as anyone planning to enter the world of entrepreneurship.

This authoritative Handbook compiles a diverse set of contributions on digital entrepreneurship, providing an in-depth study of how digital entrepreneurship research has evolved over the years, and where it stands today. Offering a snapshot of the major themes in digital entrepreneurship research, the Handbook highlights a wide range of both practice-engaged and practice-relevant works and explores the fundamental concepts and common themes in the field. Chapters examine key topics including the digital platform economy, the digitalization of work, the blockchain economy, and the rural-urban digital divide. The Handbook further analyzes the history and theory of digital entrepreneurship, while also sparking ideas for future research through a consideration of emerging phenomena and new ways to approach research in this broad area of study. Discussing a diverse set of questions, contexts, theories, and methods, this Handbook will be a key resource for researchers and advanced students with a particular interest in entrepreneurship, innovation, technology management, and digital business models. Managers and entrepreneurs will also find the discussion of digital entrepreneurship in relation to financing, social issues, and technology beneficial.

This book is about innovation ecosystems, Clusters of Innovation (COI) and the Global Networks of Clusters of Innovation (GNCOI) they naturally form. What is innovation and why is it important to us? Innovation is nothing less than the ability for constructive response and adaptation to change. The cause and catalyst for that change is frequently identified as technology and its unceasing pressure to improve on existing solutions and address unmet needs. The last decade has painfully demonstrated that exogenous environmental shocks are also sources of change that call for innovative responses, ranging from the obvious challenges such as global warming and Covid-19 to the more subtle social and political perturbations of our time. Entrepreneurs, in collaboration with venture investors and major corporations can create a flywheel of constructive engagement, a cluster of Innovation, that helps build the resiliency of our communities to adsorb and rebound from these shocks. The process is enhanced when actively supported by government, universities, and other elements of the ecosystem. This book provides the tools for understanding this value creation process and the means to enhance it, in both emerging and mature innovation ecosystems. This book provides a framework for understanding innovation in mature and emerging innovation ecosystems to a wide swath of professionals and academics, from senior executives of major corporations, government leaders, public policy makers, and consultants, to academics, researchers, and educators.

This timely and incisive Handbook provides critical contemporary insights into the theory and practice of entrepreneurship and marketing in the twenty-first century. Bringing together rich and varied contributions from prominent international researchers, it offers a reflective synthesis of scholarship at the interface between marketing and entrepreneurship. Emphasising the need for contextual analysis of marketing and entrepreneurial practices, this Handbook explores the effectiveness of a variety of behaviours, supporting its insights with relevant theory. Chapters cover areas such as innovation, strategy and networking for SMEs, social media and crowdfunding, and entrepreneurial marketing in the arts, including a focus on the growing phenomenon of cultural entrepreneurship. Scholars and postgraduate students in entrepreneurship and marketing, and particularly those working on the intersections between them, will find this Handbook an invaluable read. Its examination of the efficacy of various practices will also be of great interest to marketing professionals and entrepreneurs themselves. Contributors include: C. Ball, A. Bayraktar, S. Brown, D. Cummins, J.H. Deacon, N. Dennis, E. Erdogan, I. Fillis, J.B. Ford, I.S. Fraser, P.J. Fraser, L. Frondigoun, E. Gallagher, A. Gilmore, V. Gustafsson, B. Hynes, B. Jones, R. Jones, M. Kelly, F. Kerrigan, A. Kincaid, T.A. Kirchner, O.F. Lee, K. Lehman, E. Lloyd-Parkes, S. Loane, M. Macaulay, S. Mawson, M.P. Miles, S. Mirvahedi, S.C. Morrish, T. Morrow, S. Mottner, E.L. Ngan, K. Nightingale, R. Noorda, A. Patterson, C. Preece, E. Ramsey, R. Rentschler, E. Ritch, V.L. Rodner, J.E. Schroeder, Z. Sethna, R. Shannon, A.M.J. Smith, R. Smith, M. Suoranta, N. Telford, P. Tjabbes, C. Uslay

Timely and invigorating, this book explores how blockchain technology is disrupting economies and transforming societies. It offers detailed insights into the synergistic and complementary effects of blockchain and other new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, satellite imagery and digital twins. The Rise of Blockchains highlights how the developments of ecosystems around blockchain are helping to realize the potential of this technology to act as a 'trust machine' across more contexts and settings. Multidisciplinary in both scope and perspectives, the book looks at blockchain's potential for impacting challenges in supply chain management, security, privacy and compliancy issues, and transforming payment and settlement systems. It further provides insights into the opportunities, barriers, and enablers of blockchain adoption by organizations. With a focus on both theoretical and practical knowledge related to blockchain, this will be an important read for business and management scholars, particularly those focusing on organization studies, information systems, and supply chain management. It will also be a useful book for economics students and economists working with cryptocurrencies.

This authoritative book examines the power of multinational corporations (MNCs) to exert influence in global politics. Focusing on the actions and motivations of MNCs, it explores how they attempt to shape the political issues that affect them. Combining theoretical perspectives with analyses of enlightening case studies, the contributors consider key areas in which MNCs seek to exert political influence such as environmental sustainability, social conflicts and corporate tax avoidance, as well as in specific industries including mining, shipping and consulting. They also illustrate the mechanisms used by MNCs to exert influence in a wide range of policy fields at multiple territorial levels, discussing how they interact with states, intergovernmental organizations and civil society, as well as how they coordinate their activities with other parts of the business community. The book concludes that MNCs enjoy certain basic privileges in society and politics due to their preponderant economic position and their key role in the processes of globalization, but action is necessary to sustain this role. MNCs in Global Politics will be critical reading for academics and students of politics, international relations and political economy, particularly those with an interest in globalization and governance. Its exploration of specific case studies will also be beneficial for policy-makers.

This revealing book goes behind the scenes of normative principles of media independence to investigate how that independence is actually practiced and realized in everyday working life. Taking an ethnographically rich journey through European news organizations, Elena Raviola exposes the diverse and complex ways in which the ideal of independence is upheld, and at the same time inevitably betrayed, in the organizational life of media companies. Elena Raviola presents a distinct organizational analysis of media independence throughout the book, offering a close study of three news organizations in Europe - the largest Italian financial newspaper Il Sole-24 Ore, the largest Swedish regional newspaper company Stampen and the French pioneer online-only news website Rue89. In each of them, the implications of digitalization on their practices of independence is explored and analyzed. The book ultimately sheds light on how digital technologies are practically reshaping democratic principles such as media independence, while being embedded in the existing organizational and professional structures of democratic societies. Organizing Independence will enrich the reader's understanding of media independence in practice, beyond the normative principles, and so will be a key reference point for researchers in management and organization studies, media studies and anyone interested in the future of media.

Offering a comprehensive classification of the analytical approaches to the social within the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship studies, this book showcases a wide variety of perspectives and a collection of theoretical analysis tackling social complexity. The editors bring together contributors who mirror the heterogeneity present in the innovation and entrepreneurship fields, aiming to spark a discussion on the pluralist and critical nature of the social dimension within research, and to examine societal transformation processes and their attending multifaceted issues. Exploring how the social is analytically understood in innovation and entrepreneurship studies, the book proposes a non-exhaustive spectrum ranging from implicit assumption to explicit conceptualization in defining methodological foundations. Discussing the social and methodological challenges involved in the integration of social dimensions, this book will be a crucial companion for innovation and entrepreneurship scholars and students. This book is also a must-read for policy-makers and practitioners involved in societal transformation processes.

The Pulitzer Prize-wimming author of The Prize joins a leading expert on the global economy to present an incisive narrative of the risks and opportunities that are emerging as the balance of power shifts around the world between governments and markets -- and the battle over globalization comes front and center. The Commanding Heights is essential for understanding the struggle over the "new rules of the game" for the twenty-first century.

Although quality assurance (QA) in higher education has been well established for many years, the world of QA is changing. This timely book takes an insightful look from a nonprofit sector perspective at how these changes are impacting accreditation of higher education institutions. Using empirical data on agencies within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), Stefan Handke provides a thorough review of external assessments carried out by these agencies and reveals the transformation of nonprofit organisations with a public interest orientation into business-like organisations. The book further examines the negative impact on one of the most important functions of QA agencies: the creation of trust and how a change in the rules for external QA is required to alleviate this issue. Forward-thinking, the book also highlights the implications of these rule changes and the importance of them to ensure the survival of accreditation agencies. The expert analysis of the data within this book will be an invaluable resource for those working within QA agencies as well as stakeholders in higher education and researchers in the nonprofit sector. Students studying in the fields of public management and organisation studies will also find this book instructive and informative.

This crucial Handbook investigates an urgent area for policy-makers, academia and industries alike: the circular economy. International experts on the subject bring together the latest thinking on this critical global issue. Providing a comprehensive overview of the mechanisms and consequences of the circular economy, as well as its limitations, it raises important questions concerning how the world should proceed when non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels and minerals, are being depleted and the environment is struggling to cope with the waste and emissions of unsustainable production and consumption systems. Contributors explore a broad range of themes, such as new sustainable production and consumption systems, new design requirements, recycling systems, new business models and the social impacts of the circular economy, while also consolidating the many ways in which the topic has been dealt with in research, business and policy-making. Shedding light on a concept that has become increasingly relevant during the last decade, the Handbook of the Circular Economy is essential reading for students, academics and policy-makers trying to make sense of the plethora of ways in which the term has been applied and interpreted.

Economics for Nonprofit Managers and Social Entrepreneurs updates the world's first textbook in nonprofit economics, and shows how economics contributes to better managerial decisions on social matters. A pioneering textbook for nonprofit and social managers, this second edition adds risk analysis, game theory, and behavioral economics to the managerial tool kit, along with analysis at the margin, opportunity cost, elasticity of demand and supply, market power, and cost-benefit analysis, with numerous timely examples. This text is essential for nonprofit managers and social entrepreneurs, and of interest to all economics students.

By exploring the economic and social value of disabled people with positive entrepreneurial traits and adaptive skills, this innovative book breaks away from normative entrepreneurial studies to recognise the overlooked value in disabled entrepreneurs. In the study of entrepreneurship, the social tendency to disregard people with disabilities has caused a paucity of knowledge about the successful ventures of disabled people worldwide. Seeking to improve public understanding of disabled entrepreneurs, this pioneering book re-evaluates their identity, value and contribution beyond economic, cultural and geographical contexts. Chapters explore disabled entrepreneurs from non-Western economies and marginalised social segments, with a focus on emphasising the importance of disabled women entrepreneurs from developing economies as agents of change for society and the economy. Exploring the push and pull factors that exist for disabled people in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, chapters disassemble the socially institutionalised barriers to important sources of value creation by disabled entrepreneurs. With a global scope, this book will prove invaluable for students and scholars of entrepreneurship and business management. With expert insights into innovative practices and evidence-based policymaking from a range of disabled entrepreneurs, it will be a vital resource for entrepreneurs looking to build and grow inclusive and successful ventures.