Although entrepreneurial behavior is proposed as part of the solution to fragile labor markets, in particular in periods of economic and social change, policy makers are struggling to find the right levers to promote it. Despite the extant prior research on entrepreneurial behavior, little is known on the entrepreneurial behavior drivers for the individuals of working age with experience. Prior research explores the influence of entrepreneurial knowledge to study the drivers of experienced individuals evaluating whether or not to engage in an entrepreneurial behavior. This research introduces entrepreneurial knowledge to study the impact of prior experience on entrepreneurial intention. Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this research work analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial intention, and the mediating effects of the TPB perceptual variables: personal attitude (PA), social norm (SN), and perceived behavioral-control (PBC). A structural equation model (SEM) has been used to analyze the responses of a sample of 431 experienced individuals of working-age that completed a questionnaire based on Liñan & Chen's, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 593-618, (2009) Entrepreneurial Intention Questionnaire (EIQ). The results showed that entrepreneurial knowledge positively influences entrepreneurial intention and that this influence is mediated by the perceptual variables of the TPB model (PA, SN, PBC). These findings contribute to the understanding of the entrepreneurial intention for experienced individuals and consolidate the use of the TPB model to study individual entrepreneurial intention. The findings suggest that policy makers should pay more attention to individual entrepreneurial knowledge, and strengthen the attractiveness of an entrepreneurial career, if they are interested in fostering entrepreneurial behavior among individuals of working age with experience. Int Entrep Manag J

Entrepreneurial behavior research has used intention models to explain how an individual's beliefs shape the attitudes and motivations that influence entrepreneurial intention. Nevertheless, as entrepreneurship promotion initiatives become global, it becomes relevant to explore the consequences of being engaged in entrepreneurial behavior on entrepreneurial intention. We aim to shed light on whether the direct experience reinforces an individual's entrepreneurial intention or reduces it. Building on an extended version of the planned behavior theory, we use the behavioral reasoning theory to propose a research design to study the influence of being currently engaged in entrepreneurial behavior on entrepreneurial intention. We introduce individual's age as an additional moderator of the effects of directly experiencing entrepreneurial behavior. We use PLS-MGA to complete a multi-group SEM analysis for different groups of individuals (from a sample of 430), comparing groups based on their entrepreneurial activity and age group. Results of this research work evidence that current engagement in entrepreneurship activities produces significant differences in the intention to start a new venture between older and younger participants. The results suggest that engagement in entrepreneurial activity modifies entrepreneurial intention and that these effects are contingent to the individual's age. This research work contributes to the extant call to explore reverse causality between actual behavior and an individual's intention by introducing behavioral reasoning theory. These results provide support to initiatives to adapt entrepreneurship promotion efforts to the specific characteristics of the participants.

Despite accounting for a very small percentage of the population that adopts an innovation, the ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ — representing the two earliest groups of individuals to acquire the new product or service — play a crucial role in the dissemination of the innovation to larger market segments. The objective of this paper is to understand the characteristics of these individuals that positively influence their decisions to adopt innovations. We argue that awareness of these traits will enable firms to attain speedier uptake of their offerings while aiding policymakers achieve quicker and wider proliferation of new technologies intended for societal benefit. We undertake a review of the literature studying the diffusion of innovations and show future directions that this framework should take to analyse the adoption lifecycle.

In today’s competitive environment, firms face strong challenges. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment where open innovation is a strategic choice and, on top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized most of these disrupting forces. Incumbent companies must act strategically by adapting their business model to minimize the risk and to capture the new value that emerges. This article intends to contribute to the development of the nascent stream of research that seeks to understand the evolution of Business Models through time—known as Business Model Dynamics (BMD)—and explores how to better align this evolution to the implementation settings of strategy. This exploratory study is built upon a meta-synthesis approach to identify, analyze, and clarify how academics have dealt with the three terms used in the Business Model Dynamics research strand: Business Model Innovation, Business Model Adaptation, and Business Model Evolution. The results of the meta-synthesis show that a disambiguation of concepts is necessary as, from an organizational learning point of view, it is required to provide a better connection between strategic value appropriation and changes on Business Models. This article contributes to the researcher and practitioner’s literature on Business Model Dynamics offering a clear and rigorous definition of each term from a strategic point of view, thus preventing the conceptual incoherence and their reiterated wrong use as synonyms.

Areas of innovation (AOIs) are on the agenda of urban planners in the revitalisation of inner cities. The knowledge-based economy provides the opportunity to base these revitalisation efforts in creating AOIs as an evolution of the old industrial districts. Grounded in key conceptual frameworks in this research field-triple helix model, knowledge-based urban development paradigm, clusters of innovation framework, co-evolutionary theory, learning region theory and lifecycle of a new venture-as a reference, this work contributes to the existing literature by proposing a comprehensive model for the evolution of AOIs from inception to maturity. Using a case research study approach, the 22@Barcelona case, an AOI that transformed an old industrial district into a knowledge-based one, allows to analyse its evolution and to elaborate a model. Academic value stems from a new theorising effort of the evolution of AOIs. Urban planners benefit by getting additional clues in the revitalisation of cities.