A critical issue when setting up a board of directors in small and medium-sized enterprises relates to the chairperson position. This study examines whether and how chairperson’s experience and leadership influence the extent to which the board of directors is involved in strategy. We rely on survey data from multiple respondents in 326 firms and use regression analysis to test our hypotheses. We find that chairpersons’ board experience and leadership efficacy have a positive and significant effect on boards’ involvement in strategy. Our findings provide ample support for the significance of chairperson behaviours in explaining board outcomes in firms.   

Recent years have seen the emergence of entrepreneurial acceleration as a means for linking innovative start-ups to resources and training. While sharing common characteristics, entrepreneurial acceleration programs differ across and within ecosystems. To address this issue, we inductively looked for differences across programs to find systematic evidence of variations in their overall design and approach to entrepreneurial acceleration. Grounded on the strategic management literature, nine characterizing variables and four major types of acceleration programs were found. The closing section of the paper addresses the implications for future.

We conduct a systematic literature review of research on entrepreneurship education published in the period 1980-2017 to examine how entrepreneurship education research has developed as a scholarly field since the 1980s. Our search enables us to synthesize and analyse 334 articles published in 62 peer-reviewed academic journals. Two major observations emerge. First, entrepreneurship journals are over time playing a decreasing role as primary outlets for communicating and disseminating entrepreneurship education research. Second, entrepreneurship education research has over the past decades continued to be an interesting and highly relevant topic. However, the migration of entrepreneurship education research from “mainstream” entrepreneurship conferences and journals, combined with its closeness to (educational) practice, seems to have produced a practice-oriented research agenda largely guided by empirical descriptions, thus compromising some of its academic legitimacy.

The growth of entrepreneurship education has played an important role in building up an academic infrastructure for entrepreneurship research. In this chapter we identify exemplary European contributions to entrepreneurship education research and practice. We discuss the evolution of entrepreneurship education as a scholarly field in Europe with particular emphasis on its social infrastructure and cognitive development. Thereafter we use a systematic literature review to identify important contributions made by European-based scholars to entrepreneurship education research published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Based on the review we identify top research journals with the most published articles on entrepreneurship education, the most cited articles, and the most influential scholars. We end the chapter with a description of the European Entrepreneurship Education Award (EEEA) together with summary analyses of the work of the six Award Laureates.

The demand for medical technology innovations for improving and managing human health is global. Many players in markets for medical technology are new ventures operating in relatively small niches (Altenstetter, 2003) and struggling to build capabilities and develop internationalization strategies to scale up production and sales. However, the regulation and financing of the healthcare sector are to a large extent country specific. For example, the healthcare sector in the UK is financed through taxes, while US healthcare is primarily financed through insurance systems (Donaldson et al., 2004). Such differences affect the processes of valuing, buying and paying for medical technology innovations across the different healthcare systems and complicate procurement and reimbursement procedures for new ventures engaged in the commercialization of medical technology innovations. 

The development and commercialization of medical technology innovations are embedded in institutionally complex markets, in which layers of regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive elements (e.g. Scott, 2014) vary significantly across countries. Research that investigates the institutional environment is a promising direction to build theoretical explanations of the impact of heterogeneous markets on international entrepreneurial activities (Etemad, 2013; Jones et al., 2011a, 2011b). However, the international entrepreneurship literature has largely failed to address how institutional cross-country heterogeneity affects the sales and marketing strategies of new ventures (cf. Coeurderoy and Murray, 2008). In addition, only recently has the literature begun developing frameworks that shed better light on the impact of different customer and product types when penetrating new markets (Hennart, 2014; Onetti et al., 2012). 

The global demand for medical technology innovationscalls for better understanding of how differences across national healthcare organizations influence the international performance of medical technology ventures.Against this, in this paper we aim to develop a theoretical framework that explains the relationship between internationalization speed and performance outcomes of international new ventures (INVs) when commercializing medical technology innovations across institutionally heterogeneous markets. Our theory and logic emphasizes factors such as industry conditions, foreign market knowledge and network intensity (Oviatt and McDougall, 2005).In this vein, we acknowledge that it is critical to understand how different actors in the healthcare value chain influence INVs’ choice of countries to enter and whether their existing knowledge bases and networks are aligned with industry- and/or country-specific requirements (e.g. regulations, health economics, clinical trials). However, we also complement and extend general models of international entrepreneurship by identifying institutional healthcare dimensions (i.e. regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive) as moderating forces that explain either the acceleration or deceleration of international sales of medical technology innovations, depending on each country’s institutional healthcare setting. Thus, we suggest that a country’s healthcare setting also affects the sales process of INVs and how quickly they can get medical technology innovations adopted in the healthcare system. Building on our theory and logic, we formulate propositions and illustrate relationships among different constructs. 

This paper contributes to theory and research on international entrepreneurship field. Its main contribution is to better understand the relationship between internationalization speed and performance outcomes for INVs when operating in institutionally heterogeneous healthcaremarkets. Informed by this reasoning, we therefore introduce a conceptual model that specifies different factors that influence internationalization speed and subsequent performance outcomes.

The current state of the water and sanitation sector has put water-related innovations high on the global policy agenda. However, the systemic complexity that typically surrounds such contexts call for actionable knowledge of how to enable and orchestrate innovative solutions by connecting different players via organized networks. In this study we explore and analyse the Water Innovation Accelerator, which is a virtual network-centred incubator model designed and implemented in Sweden. Framed by theory and research on open innovation, incubation models, and entrepreneurial networks we provide an analysis of the design, working and performance of the Water Innovation Accelerator. In sum, our findings provide empirical support for virtual accelerators as an effective means to aid the development and market uptake of water related innovative solutions. Its overall effectiveness builds on its ability to bring private and public actors with different assets and competencies together via its entrepreneurial network, where the incubator team play a critical role for identifying and encouraging network-embedded innovation opportunities. However, the perceived effectiveness of the acceleration process for SMEs seems to be contingent on whether they are positioned in later stages of the innovation process, as well as their proximity to the incubator network. In these respects, the study provides valuable insights that may aid researchers, incubation managers and policy makers in current and future efforts to accelerate water innovation.

Within accounting education, both conceptual and experiential learning have been important learning approaches. However, while experiential learning has been extensively studied in accounting education, the critical role of conceptual learning has received considerably less attention. In this article, we review theory and research to develop a framework involving the Throughput Model that relates to both conceptual and experiential learning. Based on our review and combination, we suggest implications for the design and implementation of accounting education. © The Author(s) 2016.

Prior evidence suggests that board independence may enhance financial performance, but this relationship has been tested almost exclusively for Anglo-American countries. To explore the boundary conditions of this prominent governance mechanism, we examine the impact of the formal and information institutions of 18 national business systems on the board independence-financial performance relationship. Our results show that while the direct effect of independence is weak, national-level institutions significantly moderate the independence-performance relationship. Our findings suggest that the efficacy of board structures is likely to be contingent on the specific national context, but the type of legal system is insignificant. © 2017 Elsevier Inc.