Abstract
Reflection is the given standard for thought-processing at the end of year or the beginning of the new one that follows. I will join you all in wondering about the passage of 2017 and what stimuli fostered entrepreneurship and innovation during the course of the year. Life-changing phones, drones, electric cars, pet robots, artificially intelligent apps, airless tyres and social impact have featured or will feature on the front pages of many readable magazine that adorn the shelves of airport book shops or high-street retail stores. Plenty to rejoice in all that creativity, but in our reflections, we could perhaps consider what sustainable opportunities are emerging in some of the most difficult circumstances that so many people face around the world.
Consider Syria: Will the ostensible annihilation of the ISIS caliphate usher in a new army of corporate rent seekers who simply want the dead bodies to be removed? Or will it lead to a search for a collective rejuvenation of the lives of disparate people through local innovation supported by global humility and friendship? Will China, fast emerging as the only crucible of real market-focused leadership offered by a socialist state, generate new opportunities to tackle environmental pollution and global balance of power for sustainable economic ecosystems, as it is clearly showing signs of doing? Will the erstwhile standard bearer of capitalist hegemony, the USA, make America great again playing or debunking the known unknowns of alternative truth, fake presidential news? Or will it continue to lead immigrant-led innovation whatever the changes in the Oval Office? Where will the UK be when Brexit strikes directly to reduce the country’s networked leadership position in Europe? No one knows!
Naturally, I will not predict the future but I am sure we will be looking out for the big macro-events that could either boost the micro-level dynamics of creativity, enterprise, social impact or scupper them with cynical posturing in a so-called ‘sharing economy’ where the 1 per cent winning community takes all, yet again.
As we ponder, there is the exciting reality of real issues about opportunity development, resource mobilization, creative endeavour, insight and action, all demonstrated in the first JEIEE issue of 2018. Making this happen is our team of contributors from across the world. They take us from South Korea to Japan, to South Africa and Hungary to show the issues that matter in terms of people’s ability to engage with entrepreneurial value creation. Japan and South Korea are unlikely takers of the appellation, emerging economies! However, I have argued consistently that entrepreneurial emergence occurs wherever there is a search for new and productive ways of implementing new opportunities. Understanding how that takes place, critically, takes us from some of Asia’s (and the world’s) most-developed economies to the struggling emerging frontiers of South Africa and to the eastern corners of emerging Europe and to Western European shores where people are seeking new solutions to old and undefined problems. This journey covers the efforts of Japanese expatriates in a foreign land, the uniqueness of the Korean film and TV industry, the soft human and social factors that explain succession planning in family businesses, the relationship between leadership and innovative behaviour in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and to the personal knowledge management functions of smart individuals in developing competencies to overcome barriers to SME development. The idea of emergence permeates each of these issues and the locales in which they occur.
In their article on ‘Mindset and Social Entrepreneurship: Japanese Self-initiated Expatriate Entrepreneurs in Cambodia’, Kazuko Yokoyama and Sarah Louisa Birchley, from Japan, show how expatriate individuals initiate sustainable entrepreneurial ventures focusing on environmentally or socially beneficial market innovations, market-oriented and personality driven form of creating economic and societal value. Their endeavours in sustainable entrepreneurship capture the core outcomes of social entrepreneurship with creative individuals with multiple mindsets questioning the status quo to seek new opportunities for societal improvement. This article is based on the best author prize-winning paper by Yokoyama and Birchley at the sixteenth International Entrepreneurship Forum (IEF) conference, held in Kathmandu in September, 2017.
Investigating and confirming the mediating effect of organizational climate on the relationship between transformational and transactional leadership styles on innovative behaviour, Tebogo Sethibe and Renier Steyn from South Africa, explore what happens when organizations seek to develop innovative strategies. The results, shown in their article, ‘The Mediating Effect of Organizational Climate on the Relationship between Leadership Styles and Their Components on Innovative Behaviour’, demonstrate that among the components of transformational leadership styles, inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation influence innovative behaviour positively, and that in an environment conducive to innovation, the transactional leadership style has no influence in enhancing employees’ innovative behaviour.
Following a theoretical quest, Ulrich Schmitt, also from South Africa, develops the scope of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) as a tool for highly knowledgeable individuals acting competently in their daily lives, as part of the workforce, and as public citizens. In his article, ‘Supporting the Sustainable Growth of SMEs with Content- and Collaboration-based Personal Knowledge Management Systems’, Schmitt focuses attention on the collaborative and growth-related challenges of SMEs. He argues about the possibilities offered by the PKM model and its technological and educational devices to help overcome the barriers to entrepreneurial and organizational development, as SMEs move through their dynamic stages of growth, predicaments or decline.
From Korea, we hear about the ‘local buzz’ and the global pipeline approach to knowledge creation and diffusion in the creative industries. In her article ‘Local Buzz, Global Pipelines and Hallyu: The Case of the Film and TV Industry in South Korea’, Su-Hyun Berg examines how the dynamics of local buzz and global pipelines supported Hallyu (the ‘Korean Wave’ or the increased popularity of South Korean cultural goods outside of Korea) by analysing the Korean film and TV industry. Her article reminds us of the need to pay attention to the complex dynamics of knowledge flows through time and space and how changes in extra-local knowledge linkages offer opportunities for the expansion of the industry, both in domestic and international markets.
Csaba Makó, Péter Csizmadia and Balázs Heidrich (Heart and Soul: Transferring ‘Socio-Emotional Wealth’ (SEW) in Family Business Succession), offer from Hungary, insights into the transfer of socio-economic wealth (SEW) as a key intangible asset during intergenerational changes in the family business. Using empirical experiences based on multi-site company case studies in three countries (Hungary, Poland and the UK), the analysis highlights the significance of three key components of the SEW—a trust-based social system, generic human values (namely, openness, mutual respect, correctness, reliability and responsibility) and ‘practice based—embedded collective knowledge, for the succeeding generation’.
Finally, and following our very successful seventeenth IEF conference on entrepreneurship, sustainability and economic development, held high and close to the dizzying heights of the Himalayas, in Kathmandu, Nepal, we present a short report on the proceedings. Various articles selected for the purpose will be published in subsequent volumes of the journal.
We publish again the call for papers for the special issue on Transnational Entrepreneurship, which will be of interest to many of you.
This then is what is on the reading and intellectual menu for you, readers. I hope that these articles contribute in some way to all that is good in your new year.