What’s “Next”? On the Future of Digital Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Digitalization is gaining speed, latest since the global pandemics, even for those industries which only observed it as a supplementary phenomenon to their physical business activities. Despite this ongoing phenomenon and the use of catchwords such as e-business or e-commerce in both academia and practice, there is still confusion when the discussion shifts to the sphere of digital entrepreneurship—especially when it comes to the “who” and “how” of the digital entrepreneurship. The aim of this chapter is to focus on digital entrepreneurship as an ongoing phenomenon in the digital economy. In this chapter, the authors first introduce background and rationale with respect to digitalization and digital entrepreneurship by using a thematic literature review of recent contributions coming from economics and management disciplines. Next, the authors present next-generation models of digital entrepreneurship, with which they specify three important components of digital entrepreneurship as a business model, customer base, and social networks. By doing so, the authors not only aim to answer the questions of who the digital entrepreneur is, and how he/she acts in an entrepreneurial way, but they also aim to provide a knowledge base of digital entrepreneurship for future endeavors, let them be practical or theoretical ones.