The creation of a new venture is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Chinese governments at different levels are proactive in promoting the entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) and fostering new venture creation (NVC). However, it is still far from clear how governments as focal actors in the EE affect and regulate the process and pattern of NVC. This study borrows from the theory of temporary organization and conducts a comparative case study of two entrepreneurial projects in the Hangzhou Dream Town EE. This study proposes an integrated conceptual framework to illustrate NVC in two dimensions of projectification (the process of NVC) and partnering (a pattern of NVC) and specifies that the main role of local governments is as a sponsor, feeder, and endorser in that order. The three functional roles enable local governments to catalyze the creation of new ventures through projectification and partnering. Our study not only contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship, governance theory, and the theory of temporary organization but also provides an actionable approach for governments to foster new ventures, especially in transition economics such as China.

Purpose Empowering leadership is often considered unequivocally positive for employees, but recent studies have shown that this ostensibly straightforward effect is more complex. The dual facets of the effect of empowering leadership – especially on employees’ innovative behaviour – have received insufficient attention. Based on job demand-resource (JD-R) theory, this study aims to propose a theoretical framework for the relationship between empowering leadership and employees’ innovative behaviours with a dual process model of gain and loss. Design/methodology/approach This study is survey based, with 261 paired leader–employee data points collected in the People’s Republic of China. Findings The results show that empowering leadership has a “double-edged” effect on employees’ innovative behaviours: it affects innovative behaviours positively through employee job engagement and negatively through emotional exhaustion. Moreover, trust in leaders moderates the mediating roles of job engagement and emotional exhaustion. Originality/value This study contends that empowering leadership has a dual impact on employees and proposes a promising model of this double-edged effect to contrast with other complex models in the empowering leadership literature. Furthermore, this study uses JD-R theory to deeply explore the dual process whereby empowering leadership influences employees’ innovative behaviour and provides practical guidance for business management.

Since Stallman 1984 first put forward the idea of free source, open source software and open source community attract more and more attentions in the world. In literature there exists some discussions about the linkage between open source communities and innovation, on one side it has been claimed that Open Source is about imitation, not innovation, pointing out that most of Open Source programs are imitations of proprietary solutions; on the other side it has been underlined that the free circulation of ideas within the bazaar production mode makes up an environment that is particularly suitable for innovation. We consider open source community a new innovation form based on Internet and put forward a model of innovation carried out in such community. This new form gathers individual and collective effort to contribute to the new software, provide more opportunities for users to join in new product developing and create a great platform for each other to communicate.

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