Page - 296 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

over345.000deaths (WHO2020).TheoutbreakofCOVID-19notonly sentwhole countries into lockdown, but also demonstrated how relatively ill-prepared the world is for a global health crisis, even one that has long been anticipated:Corona viruses, like influenzaviruses, havebeen thecauseofpreviouspandemics andhave beenactively studied as likely candidates for futurepandemics.Despite drawingon lessons learned from recent pandemics caused by CoV, e.g. SARS, MERS, the global responsehasbeenmixed (Park et al. 2020;Malik et al. 2016;Haywardet al. 2014), partly because of inadequate databases, comparable to other global public healthchallenges likeantibiotic-resistant infections (Shamsrizi et al. 2020). Inmany cases, the responses to the crisis from governments, healthcare professionals, and the public demonstrate a significant gap between the claimed commitment to the ideals ofSDG-3, i.e.“Goodhealth andwell-being”, andactual reality in the faceof a crisis. This is of particular relevance ashealth (SDG-3) serves as a foundation for manyof theotherSDGs(Roslinget al. 2018).Considering thecurrent situation, the slow adoption of digital health in general and digital therapeutics in particular— partly because of plausible reasons (including issues of trust, data protection and reimbursement)—over the past couple of years seemsalarming.Still,digital health and especially digital therapeutics are expected to have a tremendous and positive impacton society if theyare adoptedbymore andmorepatients, doctors, andother healthcare professionals (Deloitte 2019). One way to foster digitalization in the healthcare sector and to bring better care to more people is through digital entrepreneurship.Technologicaldevelopmentsandadvances in infrastructurecreate various opportunities for entrepreneurs (Kraus et al. 2018). However, research on digital entrepreneurship is still in its infancy (Kraus et al. 2018). In this chapter,weapply aholistic perspective and see entrepreneurship asmore than just starting up a new business. FollowingHsieh andWu (2018), we under- stand entrepreneurship as “the process of designing, launching, and running new business”with its distinct characteristic of “newvalue creation” (Hull et al. 2007). However, entrepreneurial activity arises from the interplay of stakeholders, insti- tutions, andentrepreneurs themselves (Palmer et al. 2018).Referring toKraus et al. (2018), providing a state-of-the-art literature reviewof “Digital Entrepreneurship”, we understand digital entrepreneurship “as a “subcategory of entrepreneurship in which someor all ofwhatwould bephysical in a traditional organization has been digitized” (Hull et al. 2007, p. 293) and is thus defined as “the sale of digital products or services across electronic networks” (Guthrie 2014, p. 115). To sum- marize, due to the numerous opportunities for entrepreneurial activity, created through digitalization (cf., Hull et al. 2007) and its ability to develop interdisci- plinary and intersectoral solutions for complexproblems (Breidenbach et al. 2020), digital entrepreneurship offers an impactful instrument for the advancement of sustainable innovations (Kraus et al. 2018), thus the SDGs in general. Digital Entrepreneurship for the “Decade of Action” 305