Guest Editors:
Candida G. Brush, Babson College
Kimberly Eddleston, Northeastern University
Linda F. Edelman, Bentley University
Tatiana S. Manolova, Bentley University
Maura McAdam, Dublin City University
Cristina Rossi-Lamastra, Politecnico di Milano School of Management

Submissions can be made via the SEJ online submission site from October 15, 2020 to November 15, 2020.

Read full call for papers here

Special Issue Editor(s)

Human capital (HC) is highly related to the existence, competitiveness and sustainability of small enterprises (SE). On the one hand, due to limited access to tangible and financial resources in small firms, it is the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) that make it possible to create new products and services or implement innovations. On the other hand, SE, due to their share in the labour market play a crucial role in managing HC. Thus, HC issues in these types of organisations can be a field of interesting and value adding research.

Despite the fact that issues related to HC, in organisations other than large ones, has received growing researchers’ attention, in most cases they focus on a group of small and medium enterprises jointly. However, the distinction between small and medium enterprise with regard to HC and HC management (HCM) practices seems to be lacking. This special issue would like to address the gap in referring to HC and HCM in SE (i.e. up to 50 employees).

More info about the call and the submission instructions available at https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/hc-small-enterprises/?utm_source=TFO&utm_medium=cms&utm_campaign=JPG15688

Guest Editors:

• Ciro Troise, University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (Leading G.E.)
• Cyrine Ben-Hafaïedh, IÉSEG School of Management
• Sergey A. Yablonsky, Graduate School of Management Saint-Petersburg State University
• Mario Tani, University of Neaples “Federico II”

Aims and Scope
Digital transformation offers both intriguing challenges and new opportunities for these days entrepreneurs (Cohen et al, 2017; Li et al., 2018). New technologies are spreading all over the world, and new industries are rapidly changing and developing (Aydalot & Keeble, 2018). These new technologies include a wide range of new players that entered into the global arena. Among these enabling technologies there are the artificial intelligence and machine learning, the IoT and the big data, the digital platforms, the mobile applications (i.e. apps), cloud computing, blockchain, and more (as the Fintech ones, such as ICOs and crowdfunding). Their adoption and use are expected to be more and more pervasive in the next years.

The digital transformation has had consequences on several contexts, and it cannot be ignored by individuals (Andriole, 2017). New technological developments favor the creation and the diffusion of several new types of entrepreneurship (Oukil, 2011). For example, the recent advances in digital technologies have played a key role in growing a new, digital-based, entrepreneurship and for the development of related business models (Kraus et al., 2019; Nambisan, 2017). New technologies are having a disruptive impact on entrepreneurship, they change the traditional patterns, and they help to disclose new frontiers for entrepreneurs to explore in order to understand how they want to become self-employed (Broomé & Ohlsson, 2018).

A growing number of entrepreneurs leverage online social networking in order to create relations and to exchange knowledge (Scarmozzino et al., 2017). Some other studies investigated the impact of social media technologies on company performance (Ahmad et al., 2019) or the importance of the entrepreneurial teams (Ben-Hafaïedh et al., 2018; Santos et al., 2019).

Digital Platforms are among the new technologies entrepreneurs can exploit (Srinivasan & Venkatraman, 2018; Troise, 2019; Yablonsky, 2018). These new technologies have helped developing new business idea as new entrepreneurs, in fact, have focused their business models on exploiting these platforms’ characteristics.

Despite various new studies on the new technologies in several fields, as consumer behavior and innovation (Dominici, et al., 2016), there is still only a few studies specifically exploring the detail of how they are used by entrepreneurs in developing new business. In entrepreneurship studies, there are still various significant gaps on how these technologies will impact the future of entrepreneurship. There is an ongoing call for more research contributing to shed some light on various issues such as understanding the entrepreneurs “new behaviors”, with a particular focus on their motivations, the cognitive and emotional aspects, the new decision-making processes, and so on.

In this special issue we aim to explore the new entrepreneurial behaviors developed in the digital transformation era. These technologies influence entrepreneurial behaviors and have a significant impact on entrepreneurial decision-making processes. The special issue focused on the identification and analysis of the main behaviors of entrepreneurs in different fields.

Possible Topics
The Guest Editors encourage submissions of theoretical and empirical contributions investigating the impact of new technologies on entrepreneurial behaviors.

We will welcome contributions rooted in different fields, as long as the focus is on entrepreneurial behaviors and new technologies. We expect authors to provide new evidence and reveal new insights in the digital transformation era, thus contributing to the current entrepreneurship literature.

We welcome both theoretical and empirical studies, using a wide variety of methods, that advances the extant knowledge. We will welcome contributions from several disciplines as well as papers based on either quantitative or qualitative approaches.

The submission system will open 1 October 2020, Submission deadline 31 December 2020

Read more about the topics and submission guidelines HERE.

Guest editors

Dr Helen McGuirk                   helen.mcguirk@cit.ie

Dr Aisling ConwayLenihan      aisling.conway@cit.ie