Page - 275 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

1 Introduction Digital entrepreneurship is defined as the identification and pursuit of entrepre- neurial opportunities based on the creation of digital artifacts, platforms, and infrastructures thatprovide services through technology (Schmidt2011;Gionesand Brem 2017). Digital artifacts consist of applications or anymedia component that offers a specific function to users (Ekbia 2009; Kallinikos et al. 2013). A digital platform is the collection of a common and shared set of digital artifacts that provide entrepreneurs with a venue for production, marketing, and distribution processes. In the last twodecades, digital entrepreneurship has openednewvenues for entrepreneurial activities andhas transformed the nature of uncertainty inherent to entrepreneurial processes and outcomes (Nambisan 2017). In a world witnessing continuous and radical innovations, entrepreneurs are developingbusiness ideas that capitalizeon thepowerof technology.Entrepreneurs have theopportunity tooffernewproductsandservices toconsumers throughsocial media platforms and touse artificial intelligence tomeasure their impact and reach. Nevertheless, there exists aheterogeneityamongdigital businesses,where someare entirely tech-dependent (e.g., Web design, e-retail), while others just use digital- ization in theirmarketingandcommunicationsoperations. In this chapter,we focus on entirely tech-dependent businesses. Digital start-ups have very low barriers to entry, more porous and fluid boundaries, and do not require costly equipment (Nambisan 2017).They are char- acterizedbyflexibility of products or services such that there is nofixedproduct or service whose features remain constant; rather, product offerings, features, and scope continuously evolve and expand. Furthermore, digital entrepreneurship is no longer restricted to privileged capitalists. Digital entrepreneurs gain access to funding and resources through venture capitalists, crowdfunding, and bank loans (Lingelbach et al. 2005). Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding systems allow the engagement of collective stakeholders in the venture creation process, where entrepreneurs interact with customers, who provide ideas, and with investors that provide capital. Despite themany opportunities that digital entrepreneurship brings, it has also been linkedwithhigh risksoffailuregiven thecontinuousand radical technological innovations and since the role of employees in a digital business is ambiguous and undefined.Thus, theabsenceofamechanicor solidstructuremakes itmoredifficult for entrepreneurs to decide and plan a clear operations process that assigns each employee to its corresponding tasks (Brem et al. 2016). The previouslymentioned challengesandopportunities fordigital entrepreneurshiparewelldocumented in the literature, which was mostly conducted in developed countries. However, knowl- edge about the obstacles and opportunities for digital entrepreneurship in devel- oping countries remains scant. While the above-mentioned challenges and opportunities to digital entrepreneurship can persist when entrepreneurs operate in developing countries, the embeddedness of a country in a developing context adds additional 284 G. Samara and J. Terzian