Let me share a couple of links related to AI, entrepreneurship, and grand challenges – all in German:
Social entrepreneurship opens up a space for new ideas and creates opportunities to deal with conflict in innovative ways. Based on data from Afghanistan, Alina Spanuth and myself identify three ways social entrepreneurs work in conflict regions. The short piece in 
can be found here.
New co-authored article on digital social innovation and physical distancing.
Some highlights:
Abstract: As physical distancing is a core measure of containing the spread of COVID-19, this pandemic is a crisis that has uprooted social interaction. While current research mainly focuses on crises as a challenge for entrepreneurial ventures and potential regulatory response mechanisms, we complement this research by addressing the question of how crises in general—and COVID-19’s physical distancing measures in particular—shape entrepreneurial opportunities for social innovation. Based on two rounds of data collection—desktop research mapping out 95 entrepreneurial activities in Germany and four focus groups—we find first that entrepreneurs are proactive agents in alleviating the negative consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. They do so by creating two types of digital social innovation: digital brokering and digitized services. Second, we note that negative societal consequences of crises can be buffered by shifts in entrepreneurs’ strategic orientation through improvised venturing, rapid pivoting and pro-social product extension. Third, we note variance in the persistence of changes with consequences for entrepreneurial opportunities and social innovation: Whereas some social innovation are rather ephemeral, others might endure and promise long-term impacts. We offer key insights for the literature on crisis, social innovation and hybrid organizing as well as on the implications for entrepreneurship practice and policy.
Grateful to be mentioned. Even more grateful to work with wonderful colleagues on topics such as entrepreneurship, innovation, digitalization – all with a societal perspective.
In this new piece co-authored with Michael Smets, we explain that ventures may face not only a liability of newness but also a liability of novelty. The legitimacy threshold for ventures that are institutionally novel is higher than for those that are merely organizationally new. This is because they face both additional descriptive and evaluative liabilities. A new organizational form can be both “not understood” & “not accepted”.
Update: The paper has won the Emerald Literati Award 2021.
An article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung about technology and entrepreneurship in times of crisis can be accessed here.
Entrepreneurs can respond to opportunity in three ways: business-as-usual, pivoting, and new venture creation. This article in LSE Business Review is co-authored with Pegram Harrison.
Numerous digital platforms have emerged as a go-to response to the Covid-19 crisis – building on conventional platform characteristics, but using alternative, more inclusive organisational models.
Platforms face opportunities of market, motivation & momentum to address spatial, social & scale/speed challenges.
By offering the innovations that people most need right now, more inclusive platform alternatives may now have an opportunity to step up and secure a more significant role in the platform economy of the future.
The article is co-authored with Nicolas Friederici and Philip Meier.
Delighted to announce that the article “Individual and organizational inhibitors to the development of entrepreneurial competencies in universities” co-authored with Thomas Bohné finally got published at Research Policy.
The article:
The paper “Unpacking entrepreneurial opportunities: an institutional logics perspective” has just been published in Innovation: Organization & Management. The article can be found here.
Abstract: Taking into account the institutional context, I refine and broaden
the concept of entrepreneurial opportunities by introducing micro-level evaluative criteria based on underlying macro-level institutional logics. The existing focus on so-called lucrative opportunities, which is implicitly based on a market logic, narrows the overall actual set of potential opportunities, and neglects what I call the opportunity–entrepreneur desirability nexus. Enterprising individuals evaluate and pursue entrepreneurial opportunities based on various and frequently combined underlying institutional logics. The extensive institutional theory literature on managing diverse and sometimes contradictory institutional demands, for instance in the pursuit of hybrid ventures, thus offers theoretical insights that are appropriate and expedient for the analysis and theoretical advancement of the entrepreneurial opportunity notion.