Page - 180 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

2 Background There is a plethora of academic studies positioning themeaning and intent behind entrepreneurship Schumpeter (1934) viewed the entrepreneur as a leader and contributor to the process of creative destruction. Kirzner (1985) suggested that entrepreneursmostly fulfill unsatisfied needs in themarket or improve operational efficiency by detecting and closing gaps in themarketplace. In recent times, views have emerged that highlight the uncertainty underwhich entrepreneursmustmake judgments about assembling resources andmobilizing partners andmarkets (Foss, Klein and Bjørnskov 2018). Digitization and Industry 4.0 are symptomatic of a context characterized by fundamental uncertainty and asymmetric information. Perhaps themost significant challenge to large organizations in this context is the inability to foresee which business models will be the most profitable, what capabilities are needed into the long-term, andwhat the customer and competitive landscapes will consist of. This is all the more apparent which are industry boundaries blur, and non-traditional entities becomemodern-day competitors (e.g., consider Apple, Dyson, and Google) all making investments in autonomous vehicles versus the classic top car manufacturers (VW, Toyota, Renault Nissan, GM, Hyundai Kia, Ford, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Suzuki, PSA Peugeot Citroen, BMW, andMercedes-Benz). Digital entrepreneurship can be thought of as an extension of the traditional entrepreneurshipmodel; however, there are some distinct differences. The process of marketing products and services, workplaces and coordination between stake- holders are different in the digital entrepreneurship model (Hafezieh et al. 2011). E-commerce business models exist for a couple of decades (Turban et al. 2006; Mahadevan 2000)where businessmodels support business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) models and most of the companies developed their own e-commerce platforms (e.g., ebay.com, Alibaba.com, etc.). However, with technological advancements and cloud computing, platform-basedbusinessmodels haveemergedandplatformownershavemorepower than the factoryowners in the early industrial revolution. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Sales- force.com, andother platformvendorsprovide softwareplatforms tobuilddifferent e-commerce solutions quickly for a larger customer base. The platform economy has helped a new set of entrepreneurial companies like Airbnb, Uber, Lyft to connect consumers with service providers. According to Hull et al. (2007), value creation is the core purpose of entrepreneurship, where digital entrepreneurship is a subcategory of entrepreneur- shipwheremost or all of the products and services are digitized.Hair et al. (2012) suggested that market orientation is important for digital entrepreneurship and electronic community and communication play an important role for successful digital ventures. Giones and Brem (2017) further divided entrepreneurship into three categories: Technology Entrepreneurship characterized by new products based on innovative and breakthrough research and development, Digital Tech- nology Entrepreneurship where new products are based on information and Corporate Digital Entrepreneurship: Leveraging Industrial… 185