Page - (000011) - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

Introduction Digital entrepreneurship is reshaping business and communication with cloud services, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and blockchains as someof the technologies that comprise our increasingly digitisedworld. 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, thefirmand the international business contexts. To achieve theseelements, thisbookcontainscontributions fromscholars fromallover theworld, consistentwith howdigital entrepreneurship brings global challenges to entrepreneurs, firms, public institutions and governments. Acornerstoneofourbook is theeffort tobridge the theory–practicedivide.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 practicewith cases, insights and tools. Akeycomponent of digital entrepreneurship is howdigital technologies and the processofdigitisation transformhowentrepreneurscancreatenewsourcesofvalue and wealth. However, digitalisation is also transforming what it means to be entrepreneurial and the skills and capabilities required. Our further objective with this publication is to shed light on the entrepreneurial process and its content in various digital contexts. Theentireentrepreneurialprocesscan focusonadigitalventureas thecontentof an entrepreneurial journey. Someof the authors in this book investigate the impact of technologies, suchas artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technologiesor the industrial Internet of things, onnewor establishedbusinessmodels.Others discuss the influenceof digital technologies on the entrepreneurial process of generating an ideaor leveragingdigitaloptions tofinance theentrepreneurial journey.Throughout the entrepreneurial process, we believe that a deep understanding of digital cre- ativity can help an entrepreneur create the right ideas at the right time. xi