Though entrepreneurship has been studied for decades, in recent years, the study of “rural entrepreneurship” has emerged as an upcoming subtopic of the area. With the growth and continual ease of utilizing digital technologies to support entrepreneurial activities, these technologies now provide unique opportunities for advancing rural entrepreneurship. Though prior research focused on challenges for IT use in rural areas that specifically investigated investment and management issues, it is important to study all challenges and opportunities involved in this developing area of research. Rural Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Digital Era is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the utilization of digital technologies in rural business ventures. Unlike other references, this book studies the conceptualization process of rural entrepreneurship and innovation with the intention of providing guidelines and support for entrepreneurs. While highlighting topics such as microfinancing, risk management, and rural development, this publication explores innovative practices as well as the methods of IT investment and management. This book is ideally designed for business professionals, entrepreneurs, business researchers, academics, and business students.

Changes in the environment such as trends, drivers, and influencing factors affect entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship in several ways. The changes of the environmental factors in several dimensions such as political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, ecological, and legal. On the one hand, the environmental changes include risk for existing business models. On the other hand, they include opportunities for new business models, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, and new insights in marketing. This book provides empirical and conceptual papers and studies that tackle the challenges and opportunities for entrepreneurship in the digital era. It offers professionals, managers, researchers, lecturers, and students from the fields of entrepreneurship, innovation management, and business development valuable insight into the topic of entrepreneurship in times of digitalization.

This open access book explores the global challenges and experiences related to digital entrepreneurial activities, using carefully selected examples from leading companies and economies that shape world business today and tomorrow. Digital entrepreneurship and the companies steering it have an enormous global impact; they promise to transform the business world and change the way we communicate with each other. These companies use digitalization and artificial intelligence to enhance the quality of decisions and augment their business and customer operations. This book demonstrates how cloud services are continuing to evolve; how cryptocurrencies are traded in the banking industry; how platforms are created to commercialize business, and how, taken together, these developments provide new opportunities in the digitalized era. Further, it discusses a wide range of digital factors changing the way businesses operate, including artificial intelligence, chatbots, voice search, augmented and virtual reality, as well as cyber threats and data privacy management. “Digitalization mirrors the Industrial Revolution’s impact. This book provides a complement of perspectives on the opportunities emanating from such a deep seated change in our economy. It is a comprehensive collection of thought leadership mapped into a very useful framework. Scholars, digital entrepreneurs and practitioners will benefit from this timely work.” Gina O’Connor, Professor of Innovation Management at Babson College, USA “This book defines and delineates the requirements for companies to enable their businesses to succeed in a post-COVID19 world. This book deftly examines how to accomplish and achieve digital entrepreneurship by leveraging cloud computing, AI, IoT and other critical technologies. This is truly a unique “must-read” book because it goes beyond theory and provides practical examples.” Charlie Isaacs, CTO of Customer Connection at Salesforce.com, USA "This book provides digital entrepreneurs useful guidance identifying, validating and building their venture. The international authors developed new perspectives on digital entrepreneurship that can support to create impact ventures.” Felix Staeritz, CEO FoundersLane, Member of the World Economic Forum Digital Leaders Board and bestselling author of FightBack, Germany

Digital technologies have become a new economic and social force, reshaping traditional business models, strategies, structures, and processes. Digital entrepreneurship, which focuses on creating new ventures and transforming existing businesses by developing novel digital technologies or their novel usage, is seen as a critical pillar for economic growth, job creation, and innovation by many countries. Further, digital technologies have also enabled the growth of the sharing economy, linking owners and users and disrupting the previous dualism of businesses and customers.This volume discusses the management of new technology-based firms and technology projects initiated in academic or industrial contexts. The contributions feature new theoretical concepts, ethical considerations, empirical data analysis (qualitative and quantitative), archival and historical methods, design science approaches, action and field research, as well as management science methods, informatics and cybernetics.

Technology has enabled a new age of entrepreneurship as entrepreneurs find digital tools that enable new ventures to exploit commercial opportunities around the world. This textbook provides students with expert guidance on using technology platforms to start new ventures. With an award-winning approach, the author guides readers through the process of a lean startup, taking a "digital first" approach to entrepreneurship. Students using the book will emerge with enhanced understanding of different digital business models, analytical skills for digital ventures, and the confidence to move from prototype to product. Online resources such as slides, a sample syllabus, and exercises encourage the classroom to become an interactive and dynamic space.

In order to establish and maintain a successful company in the digital age, managers are digitally transforming their organizations to include such tools as disruptive technologies and digital data to improve performance and efficiencies. As these companies continue to adopt digital technologies to improve their businesses and create new revenues and value-producing opportunities, they must also be aware of the challenges digitalization can present. Business Transformations in the Era of Digitalization is a collection of innovative research on the latest trends, business opportunities, and challenges in the digitalization of businesses. Highlighting a range of topics including business-IT alignment, cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), business sustainability, small and medium-sized enterprises, and digital entrepreneurship, this book is ideally designed for managers, professionals, consultants, entrepreneurs, and researchers.

Entrepreneurship is now more in demand than ever before. However, entrepreneurship in digital era is not limited to holding online meetings, paperless office or communication on social media. Rather, it must be seen as a holistic approach to thinking that encompasses all processes of an organisation, including communication and service provision. If we succeed in "thinking digitally", such as integrating digital process support at all levels, we can experience long-term success and keep uprising competitors at bay. Entrepreneurship is increasingly being recognised as a means to stimulate change and growth within and across national economies. This in turn elevates the expectations of teachers and students of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship students are in turn expected to engage in elevated risk for the benefit of the broader community and create businesses and social organisations that generate prosperity and wealth. In current times we also face the looming crisis of human-induced climate change. The question this scenario raises for readers and users of this book. Many famous entrepreneurs never finished school. But the fact is that education and entrepreneurship are highly correlated - the more education you have, the more likely you are to engage successfully in entrepreneurship. Even if you have just one class in entrepreneurship, you are more likely to become an entrepreneur, more likely be self-employed, have potentially higher annual incomes, and set up your own business after graduation, compared to your peers. The next confronting question for any entrepreneurship academic is, can we actually teach entrepreneurship? Again, yes and no. Yes, students can learn it and it takes two forms. The first is education that helps learners to discover whether there is a spark within themselves. The second is that teaching facilitates learning the skills, both in mind and in practice that characterises your own personal form of entrepreneurship. What teachers can and should do is create a world where students can learn to be an entrepreneur by becoming more confident in their abilities and learning skills needed to achieve success in a social or business venture. But the answer is also no, when you think of most classrooms. It's not about PowerPoint presentations and lectures; instead, it's about having experiences and creating opportunities for entrepreneurship. In those precious minutes together with learners, an entrepreneurship educator needs to provide content that is both enabling and experiential, where you can sit at the elbow of real entrepreneurs, be challenged by the real problems of an entrepreneur, be given access to tools and techniques to work through those problems and ultimately, where you can learn the craft of entrepreneurship. It is always someone able to juggle work, family, and civic responsibilities while meeting payroll. To provide an understanding of this person and the process of creating and growing a new venture on an international basis, this Entrepreneurship in a Digital Era is divided into fourteen major chapters as follows: Chapter 1: Entrepreneurship Foundation; Chapter 2: An Entrepreneur; Chapter 3: Entrepreneurship as A Social and Economic Process, Chapter 4: The Entrepreneurial Process; Chapter 5: The Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurs; Chapter 6: Discovering Business Opportunities; Chapter 7: Feasibility Analysis and Financing Of A Business; Chapter 8: Understanding entrepreneurship; Chapter 9: Business Environment; Chapter 10: State of Entrepreneurship in Nigeria; Chapter 11: Financing the Entrepreneurial Business; Chapter 12: Digital Entrepreneurship; Chapter 13: Forms Of Business Organisations and Managerial Skills, Chapter 14: Unleashing the Creativity of Entrepreneurs with Digital Technologies; Chapter 15: The Entrepreneur Going Global