Editorial

By the time most readers will have had a chance to read this editorial and the thought inducing articles in this issue, Donald Trump would have inaugurated the change of the world order! So, 2017 promises change but hope might flounder in a different category of expectations. These may sound like fatuous statements but if you have the biggest political shock of 2016 turning into a reality where business might be done differently, then the mind starts concentrating on a range of possible eventualities. Will nation states clamouring for a new strength through higher levels of nationalism have time to support and promote cross-border innovation? Witness the currency of Brexit in England, and the cries of hate in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, India and the United States. Will the great Chinese vision of new silk routes over land across oceans set the trend for new forms of global entrepreneurship? Will this vision offer the hope that counters the incipient serpent crawl of nationalism? And no one will forget Syria and Iraq where the faint light of a renewal of life could signal at least the emergence of a new form of moral and public entrepreneurship. Where a nation state needs rebuilding, there is either fractious turbulence or the recreation of opportunity out of scarcity.

How will or how can entrepreneurship and innovation respond to the big global agenda? Perhaps in more ways than one but whatever happens, it will be up to the social, business, political and moral entrepreneurs of our times to make an impression. This larger grouping of the usual and some unusual entrepreneurs could take the cue from our now well-entrenched open innovation systems, crowdsourcing of ideas and resources, user–producer relationships, digital enterprises and platform technologies that straddle economic and social interest. As producers, consumers, provocateurs and citizens, they could reset our economic and social agendas. As networks, they could be the agents of a new form of civic or citizen entrepreneurship. While most of our established institutions reel in the turmoil of failed objectives, actions and values, entrepreneurship, redefined, can perhaps engender hope and then a productive form of optimism.

The Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Economies (JEIEE) will continue to provide a platform for emergent and redefined entrepreneurship. As we enter our third year of publication, there is much to be gained from knowing and understanding critically from the emergence of entrepreneurial capability in different contexts around the world. It is surprising how little we know of what happens outside the environment of index leaders where entrepreneurship thrives on technological gains and financial hegemony. So, this is where we continue with our endeavour for showcasing the larger reality of entrepreneurship and environment in all emerging economies and in alternative forms and communities.

In this issue, we have Murugesan and Jayavelu revisiting the much vaunted question of personality traits and self-efficacy on entrepreneurial intentions, but in a different context and across gender. Their findings offer support for the relation of openness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness, and self-efficacy with entrepreneurial intention with some exceptions. Ganamotse Ntshadi , Mphela, Abankwah, Tibaingana and Samuelsson discuss critically the business acceleration model of the Global Business Labs (GBL) and their replication in Botswana, Namibia and Uganda based on a Swedish model, but their failure in Mozambique and Zambia, asking questions about the importance of contextual, institutional and other factors in the success and failure of business accelerators. In a unique ethnographic study of female, Pakistani diaspora entrepreneurs in London, Asma Rauf investigates the interplay of gender, ethnicity and religion shaping the personal network of these entrepreneurs and how that challenges normative patterns of female entrepreneurship. In delving into the contemporary angst of well-being in organisations, Gopinath and Mitra check out how this concept works in entrepreneurial firms known for their high velocity and sometimes, unforgiving, approach to innovation. In a ‘points of view’ piece, Archana Singh, Satyajit Majumdar and Gordhan K. Saini enter the slightly jaded world of corporate social responsibility to explore how the championing of social entrepreneurship by corporates could restore a better sense of purpose for social responsibility. Finally, Raj K. Shankar explores new insights into family businesses in his book review of Theoretical Perspectives on Family Business by Nordqvist et al.

This then is the rich fare of emergent communities of entrepreneurial interest that we share with you—a perfect, new year antidote to the thoughts of problematic change in the global political and economic arenas. What else could matter in discourse and debate than this offer of fresh insights in a so-called ‘post-truth’ world? I hope you will enjoy this issue and consider making your own contributions to the JEIEE and the emergence of new values in 2017 and beyond.