Future of Business and Finance Mariusz Soltanifar Mathew Hughes Lutz Göcke Editors Digital Entrepreneurship Impact on Business and Society Future of Business and Finance The Future of Business and Finance book series features professional works aimed at defining, describing and charting the future trends in these fields. The focus is mainly on strategic directions, technological advances, challenges and solutions which may affect the way we do business tomorrow, including the future of sustainability and governance practices. Mainly written by practitioners, consultants and academic thinkers, the books are intended to spark and inform further discussions and developments. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/16360 Mariusz Soltanifar Á Mathew Hughes Á Lutz Göcke Editors Digital Entrepreneurship Impact on Business and Society 123 Editors Mariusz Soltanifar Mathew Hughes Hanze University of Applied Sciences Loughborough University International Business School School of Business and Economics Groningen, The Netherlands Loughborough, Leicestershire, UK Open University Faculty of Management Heerlen, The Netherlands Lutz Göcke Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences Chair of Digital Management Nordhausen, Germany ISSN 2662-2467 ISSN 2662-2475 (electronic) Future of Business and Finance ISBN 978-3-030-53913-9 ISBN 978-3-030-53914-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53914-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To all the digital entrepreneurs out there, who are driven to put a dent in the universe! Foreword In the digital age, entrepreneurship is now more in demand than ever before. However, digital entrepreneurship is not limited to holding online meetings, paperless office or communication on social media. Rather, it must be seen as a holistic approach to thinking that encompasses all processes of an organisation, including communication and service provision. If we succeed in “thinking digi- tally”, such as integrating digital process support at all levels, we can experience long-term success and keep uprising competitors at bay. Data, information and knowledge are the new factors of success that lead to new market opportunities and business models through their intelligent combination and networking with operational performance and service provision. This ranges from platform economics to support systems, as well as the use of new technologies to make processes more effective and elegant. It is precisely the exploration of promising opportunities and the creation of unique ideas that offer digital entre- preneurs the potential to successfully develop their business. The design of business models, the planning of the architecture of software and hardware components, as well as the storage of individual data, information and knowledge components, form the core of the new digital entrepreneurial approach. There has been much discussion of agility, disruptive processes and the con- stantly increasing speed of market developments. Therefore, the digital entrepre- neurial personality must maintain the following competencies: • Creativity, organisational skills and a feel for market opportunities • Strong knowledge of the technical requirements and the competitive environment • Courage to apply the process of creative destruction to their own business or its processes at any time. In doing so, new ideas and their implementation must be kept in view, as well as one’s own service offerings, and the way they are created. In particular, the demands on quality, efficiency and speed of the processes force entrepreneurship when updating and revising internal processes. At the University of Applied Sciences, Nordhausen, we have initiated two major developments on our path to an entrepreneurial university and to qualify our stu- dents as digital entrepreneurs. We have developed a Bachelor of Arts in Digital vii viii Foreword Product Management to enable students to identify market opportunities for digital products and realise these products together with software engineers. In addition, we created an incubation program to boost early stage start-up founders at our university with financial and consultative support. This book aims to provide an overview of the main factors influencing digital entrepreneurship and will be of value for any digital entrepreneur. The authors have considered the determining factors for digital business, aspects of corporate entrepreneurship and legal framework conditions. A characteristic feature of these observations is that the digital entrepreneur is consistently placed at the centre of attention. We will leverage the created content in our courses of studies as well as our entrepreneurial programs to create entrepreneurial personalities. Prof. Dr. Jörg Wagner President of the University of Applied Sciences Nordhausen Nordhausen, Germany Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge each author who has contributed to this book. We recognise the hard work you do to support digital entrepreneurship in your roles at universities and companies, and we thank you for the time and effort spent on writing your respective chapters. Thanks to Jörg Wagner of the University of Applied Sciences, Nordhausen, and the Thuringian state government in Germany for the generous funding to enable the open access publishing of this book. The developed thoughts are of open access to all entrepreneurs and their teams globally. We would like to express our gratitude to our participating companies for the cases discussed in this book. Many have provided great insights and opened their resources to develop the cases. We also thank everyone who has trusted us in the quality of our work by writing an endorsement for this book. We also thank Stefan Hertanu, Suzan Snijder, Siyuan Sun, and Ivaylo Tenev, the International Business School students of the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, The Netherlands for assisting in the dissemination process of the book and communicating its value to our readers. ix Introduction Digital entrepreneurship is reshaping business and communication with cloud services, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and blockchains as some of the technologies that comprise our increasingly digitised world. This book examines these and other digital developments for their impact on entrepreneur- ship. In our understanding, digital entrepreneurship focuses on leveraging digital technologies or digital business models to explore and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. Our quest in this book is to shed new light on digital entrepreneur- ship, understand the critical factors in successful digital entrepreneurship and understand the context sensitivity of digital entrepreneurship efforts, including, but not restricted to, the individual, the firm and the international business contexts. To achieve these elements, this book contains contributions from scholars from all over the world, consistent with how digital entrepreneurship brings global challenges to entrepreneurs, firms, public institutions and governments. A cornerstone of our book is the effort to bridge the theory–practice divide. Each of the chapters provides two contributions: First, each chapter is embedded in theory and literature on the phenomenon of interest; second, each chapter contains digital entrepreneurship vignettes as insightful cases into digital entrepreneurship practice. Each chapter strives to connect research and practice with cases, insights and tools. A key component of digital entrepreneurship is how digital technologies and the process of digitisation transform how entrepreneurs can create new sources of value and wealth. However, digitalisation is also transforming what it means to be entrepreneurial