Masatoshi Kato, Kwansei Gakuin University

David Audretsch, Indiana University

Roy Thurik, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Maksim Belitski, University of Reading

Alex Coad, Waseda Business School

Eric Liguori, Florida State University

Rapid technological change, globalization of supply chains and demand, increasing physical and digital connectivity, and inter-dependencies between actors in innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems are forcing entrepreneurs and managers to rethink how they organize beyond the manufacturing of products and services, how they innovate, what technologies they adopt, and what markets they enter. The forms and models of organization affect a firm's ability to become exceptional. At the core of firm organization, the factors that distinguish them from their counterparts in the industry and region are firm size, firm age, stage of entrepreneurial continuum, institutional context, and technology-savviness. Firms that have been able to optimize their organization will outperform their regional competitors, markets, and industry; create new forms of growth at a different pace; and approach the innovation and production frontier. Through organizations in different forms, entrepreneurs and mature firms create product and process innovation and coordinate people, external ecosystem actors, government, suppliers, and capital to achieve frontier outcomes.

This collection is especially interested in organizational forms enabling rapid growth without compromising productivity, efficiency, and societal impact, and facilitating innovation and market entry, firm resilience, and survival within both firm shocks and exogenous shocks. Moreover, the collection is interested in understanding how firms' high growth, scaling, and exceptional performance are driven by novel organizational forms. This focus is timely for the Journal of Small Business Management as an intellectual platform that studies why and how the most novel forms and models of organization in performance, growth, efficiency, and innovation are emerging in large tech firms and in exceptional performers among micro-, small-, and micro-firms, in social entrepreneurial firms, and even non-profit organizations. The special focus includes the novel forms of organization that allow for persistent steady growth, high value added, and other exceptional performers—such as niche innovators, scaleups, accelerators, blitzscalers, hidden champions, and Mittelstand-type firms and hyperspecialized firms—that repeatedly outperform their counterparts in the industry.

By combining specific forms of organization, these firms often operate nearby or at the innovation and production frontier despite constrained resources and through global or localized resource orchestration. Hidden champions or niche innovators—for example, hyperspecialized digital and non-digital firms that focus on a small set of activities and scale through digital technologies or localized networks and interdependencies with complements and partners often plugging into collaborators' value chains—are highly successful small firms that hold top global market positions in niche segments.

Global outreach is an important locus to understand novel forms of organization. Global firms, such as micro-multinationals or born-global firms, are young and small firms that internationalize early, working with a lean core and extensive external partners for production, distribution, or customer acquisition, and often relying on global value-chain orchestrators. While prior work has examined financial performance, resource management, scaling, and innovation in such firms, most evidence comes from European contexts, with little evidence from other regions of the world. For example, niche leaders in parts of Asia may begin with an imitation strategy and then move up the value ladder. These firms may be more likely to pursue listing and brand recognition, may expand into adjacent domains beyond niche focus, and may balance domestic and global knowledge via investment in training, R&D, and engagement with ecosystem actors regionally and globally. Little is known about how organizational forms differ across regions, industries, countries, and clusters, or which specific characteristics enable them to experiment, adopt, and develop certain forms of organization that ensure their exceptional performance.

This online collection invites work that theorizes and empirically examines novel forms and models of organization, including structures, processes, architectures, institutions, and governance, that enable firms of different ages, sizes, and niche focus to approach or redefine the productivity and innovation frontier. The collection welcomes research that opens the black box of novel forms and models of organization, enabling firms to outperform their close and distant competitors, recombine a variety of knowledge, and adopt new modes of working, hiring, and innovating to achieve exceptional performance. Additionally, the collection welcomes research that explains when, how, and why particular organizational forms and models outperform others across regions, industries, clusters, and ecosystems in diverse contexts of high-cost developed economies, high-cost emerging economies, and other developing economies.

This collection is expected to investigate how novel forms of organization can appear beyond the OECD and WEIRD countries representing Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies (primarily North America, Western Europe, Australia, and parts of East Asia like Japan/South Korea). Interestingly, most developed Asian economies have actively identified and cultivated niche leaders and innovators through national programs, such as Japan's Global Niche Top Companies Selection 100 and South Korea's World-Class 300 & Global Specialized Enterprise Cultivation. In China, two policy-driven categories—niche champions and specialized, advanced, differentiated, and innovative firms—aim to move small businesses up global value chains, emphasizing market performance, strategic uniqueness through innovation, competitive advantage, internationalization, and sustainable growth. Understanding new forms and models of organization for innovation and firm growth will create a rich empirical setting and extend existing growth and innovation theories.

Potential topics

• How do firms adopting novel forms of organization differ in leadership, governance, and decision-making, and how do these differences shape innovation and productivity at the frontier?
• What internal microstructures (e.g., boards, design, cross-functional teams, routines) enable firms to combine and recombine internal capabilities with external knowledge and ecosystem actors to achieve exceptional performance?
• How do novel organizational forms affect authority, accountability, and coordination across functions, and what are the effects on innovation speed, product and managerial innovation, value creation, talent retention, growth, and scaling?
• Which combinations of internal investment (make), external acquisition (buy), and alliance orchestration (ally) constitute novel organizational models that sustain frontier performance across firm types (hidden champions, niche leaders, sustained innovators, blitzscalers, scalers, etc.)?
• How does the diversity (institutional and geographic) of external knowledge and innovation partners translate into firms adopting novel forms of organization, and what internal routines convert diverse inputs into outcomes?
• Under what conditions do international vs regional knowledge collaboration and spillovers generate non-redundant knowledge that improves innovation and performance, and how do firms with different organizational forms apply, filter, and integrate this knowledge?
• How does digitalization (AI and robotics, data systems, cloud, prominent role of intangibles, etc.) reshape internal process architectures, and which organizational forms best convert digital investments into productivity and innovation gains?
• Which governance models (data rights, intellectual property, cybersecurity, partner contracts) enable novel organizational forms to adopt and scale complex technologies while maintaining trust and control in technology and partners?
• How do digitally savvy firms pivot and reconfigure organizational forms to build resilience to supply, demand, and geopolitical shocks, and what design features predict faster recovery and sustained innovation?
• How do firms implement novel forms of organization while embedded in industry and entrepreneurial ecosystems, and how does ecosystem position shape organizational models for innovation and scaling?
• How do niche leaders and other exceptional performers orchestrate global supply chains as an organizational capability, not only a sourcing choice, across regional and international contexts?
• What partner portfolio mixes (universities, suppliers, customers, competitors, government, research labs, conferences, competitions, trade and industrial associations, scientific communities) are associated with frontier outcomes, and what form of organization do firms need to adopt to efficiently govern such collaborations, knowledge spillovers, and firm strategies?
• How do relationships with government shape novel organizational models through procurement, standards, subsidies, and cluster governance, and when do these relationships enhance versus constrain innovation and productivity?
• How do organizational models vary between emerging and traditional industries and across industrial clusters of novel and emerging industries where traditional forms of organization are no longer working?
• How do deglobalization pressures and techno-nationalism reshape firms' organizational choices?
• What distinctive business model configurations characterize exceptional performers across countries, regions, industries, and stages of growth, age, and size, and how are these configurations enabled by organizational form?
• How do European, Asian, American, and African leaders in WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries differ in adopting and experimenting with novel forms of organization?
• What contextual factors explain these cross-country differences?
• Do niche leaders exhibit distinctive innovation patterns (radical vs incremental, product vs process, ecosystem vs standalone), and which organizational designs best explain variation in these patterns and their performance effects?

Timeline

• November 1, 2026: Manuscript submission opens
• November 15, 2026: Submission deadline for extended abstracts and full papers
• January 31, 2027: Manuscript deadline

Maksim Belitski, Loyola University New Orleans

James Cunningham, Newcastle University

Riccardo Fini, University of Bologna

Simon Mosey, University of Nottingham

Phillip Phan, Johns Hopkins University

The Journal of Technology Transfer is pleased to introduce a new Special Collection on Technology Transfer through Collaboration: Bridging Academia, Policy, and Practice. The collection invites submissions that examine technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and innovation through collaborations between academic researchers and non-academic actors in policy and practice.

Timely and high-quality research on technology transfer often emerges from close interaction between academics, practitioners, and policymakers. Such collaborations can provide access to emerging phenomena, reveal underexplored mechanisms, and generate insights that may not be visible through conventional data sources or established theoretical lenses alone. The aim of this Special Collection is to support rigorous research that draws on boundary-spanning collaborations to advance scholarship on technology transfer while also generating meaningful implications for policy and practice.

The Special Collection particularly welcomes papers co-authored by academics and non-academic actors, including but not limited to technology transfer professionals, policymakers, entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, industry experts, platform managers, R&D managers, and innovation intermediaries. Such collaborations provide unique insights to policy and practice environments, enhance access to data, expand the contextual reach of empirical work, and address fundamental questions through a diversity of collaborative perspectives. Submissions should use collaborative engagement to develop new theory, enrich empirical analysis, access distinctive data, and address important questions in technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Contributions should combine methodological rigor with practical and policy-relevant insight and demonstrate novel, impactful contributions to technology transfer scholarship.

The Special Collection is intended to create a lasting foundation for cumulative scholarly development rather than a one-off set of papers. The Journal of Technology Transfer remains firmly committed to its identity as a double-blind, rigorously peer-reviewed academic journal. Submissions must meet the journal's standards for theoretical contribution, methodological rigor, empirical credibility, and clarity of argument. The goal of this Special Collection is not to relax scholarly standards, but to broaden the range of relevant questions, data sources, contexts, and perspectives that inform high-quality research in technology transfer.

Potential topics

• Papers co-authored by academics and non-academic actors, including technology transfer professionals, policymakers, entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, industry experts, platform managers, R&D managers, and innovation intermediaries
• Technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and innovation through boundary-spanning collaborations
• Development of new theory through collaborative engagement
• Enrichment of empirical analysis using collaborative perspectives
• Access to distinctive data through academic-non-academic partnerships
• Addressing important questions in technology transfer, entrepreneurship, and innovation from multiple collaborative perspectives

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Submission deadline

Societal changes, environment, political and financial crises inevitably affect labor markets and the quality of employment. Recent pandemic and global political changes have only demonstrated how quickly one's employment and workplace situation can change. Among other factors, entrepreneurship could play a crucial role in the creation of decent work, especially in a volatile environment.

Understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and working conditions is crucial for supporting policies and instruments which aim at more productive, decent work, fair wages, better access to the labor market, and improved job opportunities for all.

In order to fully represent this multifaceted topic, we would like to gather a spectrum of current perspectives in a single Collection, facilitating a better understanding of possibilities and ways of striving toward the goal of 'achieving full and productive employment and decent work for all' (SDG 8 of the U.N.).

Submissions to this collection may be research or review articles, depending on the individual journal guidelines. Each submission will undergo thorough and rigorous peer review in accordance with each journal's peer review editorial policy. Accepted articles will be published in the journal they were submitted to, as well as highlighted on this collection page.

Potential topics

• Equal pay for work of equal value
• Gender discrimination in employment
• Immigration and employment
• Labor shortages after COVID-19
• Modern slavery and child labor
• Labor policy
• Entrepreneurial enterprises, SMEs, and family businesses
• Global entrepreneurial firms: organization design, emerging conceptions in entrepreneurship (i.e. born globals), globalization's challenges and opportunities, cultural differences
• Remote work
• Opportunity entrepreneurship as a direct way to generate high quality employment
• Measuring and dealing with positive and negative externalities of new businesses

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Submission deadline

Stefano Bresciani, University of Torino

Jawad Abbas, James Cook University

Fauzia Jabeen, Abu Dhabi University

In today's dynamic evolving technology landscape, firms face a transformative wave caused by technological advancements which are omnipresent, from automating manufacturing processes to leveraging big data analytics for strategic decisions. This development warrants entrepreneurial firms to develop digital capabilities strategically to navigate these changes, effectively positioning themselves for innovation and growth and enabling them to improve their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance.

This call for papers focuses on exploring the strategies employed by entrepreneurial firms in building digital capabilities to enhance their ESG performance, addressing challenges, and leveraging opportunities in sustainable business practices.

In an ever-changing technological milieu where technological proficiency is synonymous with competitive advantage, fostering digital capabilities becomes a survival necessity, empowering firms to orchestrate agility, resilience, and sustainable performance. The digital age has ushered in transformative opportunities and challenges, redefining the landscape for entrepreneurial firms striving to align with ethical, social, and environmental responsibilities.

Entrepreneurial ventures, characterized by innovation, agility, and risk-taking, are at the forefront of shaping the future of business. Their unique characteristics make them prime actors in navigating the complexities of integrating digital capabilities for improved ESG outcomes. Improving ESG performance is imperative for organizations, transcending mere compliance to embody a commitment to sustainable and ethical practices. This commitment holds profound implications for various stakeholders, ranging from shareholders to customers, suppliers, employees, and others.

Improved ESG performance mitigates risks associated with environmental impact and social responsibility, enhances corporate reputation, and attracts conscientious investors. Stakeholders increasingly scrutinize ESG metrics as a reflection of an organization's ethical standing and long-term viability. It fosters a symbiotic relationship, aligning corporate objectives with societal expectations and contributing to building a more responsible and resilient business ecosystem.

This Collection aims to unravel the intricate role of building digital capabilities in entrepreneurial firms' improved ESG performance. By exploring this intersection, we seek to understand how digital capabilities can contribute to a more environmentally and socially responsible entrepreneurial firm with a strong governance structure. We invite experimental, conceptual, theoretical, and empirical studies exploring the convergence of digital capabilities in shaping entrepreneurial firms' ESG performance, shed light on challenges, and explain solutions.

While the listed topics and questions are primary interests, we remain open to manuscripts that explain other complexities relevant to digital capabilities and ESG performance. We are keen to receive manuscripts that employ innovative methods and engage deeply with the prevailing dilemmas and dialogues in entrepreneurial research. Your insights and academic rigor will help broaden our collective comprehension of the complexities, challenges, and impacts surrounding building digital capabilities strategies and their implications for ESG performance.

Potential topics

• How do entrepreneurial ventures define and measure ESG performance in the digital era? And what critical digital capabilities contribute to their improved ESG performance?
• What challenges do entrepreneurial firms face in integrating digital solutions to enhance environmental sustainability? What could be the best practices for tackling those challenges?
• What are the possible learning mechanisms and knowledge-sharing processes within entrepreneurial ecosystems that could foster development of digital capabilities for ESG goals?
• What roles do leadership and organizational culture play in fostering digital capabilities for superior ESG performance in entrepreneurial firms?
• How can entrepreneurial firms effectively utilize digital technologies to measure and improve their environmental performance within ESG frameworks?
• How can digital capabilities be harnessed to address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) challenges in entrepreneurial firms, contributing to improved social sustainability?
• How do digitalization efforts impact the governance structures of entrepreneurial firms in the context of sustainability? What actions could be taken to improve it?
• To what extent do regulatory frameworks influence the adoption of digital strategies for ESG compliance in entrepreneurial settings?
• How do digital technologies facilitate transparency and accountability in ESG reporting for entrepreneurial firms?
• How can entrepreneurial firms balance profitability goals with sustainable practices through digital transformations? Under this scenario, which opportunities and challenges could arise?
• What lessons can we learn from recent, real-world cases that showcase the impact of digital capabilities on ESG performance in different industries, particularly entrepreneurial firms, and how can new guidelines lead toward improved ESG performance?

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Submission deadline

Diego Matricano, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"

This Multi-Journal Collection is a cross-disciplinary resource for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers interested in entrepreneurship as a way to address paramount global issues. The collection emphasizes the expected and realized changes as well as the implications related to entrepreneurship phenomena.

Papers featured in this collection investigate the impact of entrepreneurship with an eye toward how it can shape the future, utilizing micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis. The collection welcomes contributions that explore entrepreneurship across diverse contexts and dimensions, including international dimensions, sustainability concerns, demographic characteristics, educational aspects, and ecosystem dynamics.

Potential topics

• Entrepreneurship as a way to address global issues
• Impact of entrepreneurship on shaping the future
• Micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis of entrepreneurship
• Expected and realized changes in entrepreneurship phenomena
• Implications of entrepreneurship phenomena
• International entrepreneurship and globalization
• Sustainable and green entrepreneurship
• Female and women entrepreneurship
• Social entrepreneurship
• Entrepreneurship education
• Digital entrepreneurship and digitalization
• Startup ecosystems and entrepreneurial ecosystems
• Entrepreneurial motivation and behavior
• Innovation and entrepreneurship
• Risk-taking and resilience in entrepreneurship
• Entrepreneurial networks and ecosystems
• SMEs and entrepreneurship
• Circular economy and entrepreneurship

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Submission deadline

Tina Dacin, Queen's University

Robin Holt, University of Bristol

Jean Clarke, Emlyon Business School

Jaco Lok, Macquarie University

Max Ganzin, Macquarie University

This Special Issue seeks to foreground the ethical dimensions of venture creation, opportunity recognition, and stakeholder engagement. It invites scholars to reimagine entrepreneurship as an inherently ethical practice, instead of viewing ethics as a constraint or an afterthought in the pursuit of economic gain. The intersection of ethics and entrepreneurship presents a unique opportunity to rethink and shape new ethical paradigms and foster innovative approaches to the persistent questions of responsibility, justice, and human flourishing. Entrepreneurship is often celebrated as a catalyst for creativity, imagination, and the capacity to disrupt, yet it has also drawn criticism for promoting ideals that valorize self-optimization and commodification. The foundational activities of entrepreneurship – venture creation, opportunity enactment, and creative destruction – are themselves inextricably bound to questions of ethics.

At the core of any entrepreneurial act is its willing encounter with, and encouragement of, 'the other' - whether this means novel products, new practices, uncertain futures, or transformed habits. From some philosophical perspectives, such as phenomenology, ethical experience also involves engagement with the 'other,' coupled with a refusal to confine or transform 'the other' to the norm. Yet this raises a critical question: if entrepreneurship courts 'the other,' does it then corrupt and empty this otherness in the calculated pursuit of economic returns? If ethics entails a life lived alongside difference, then how do entrepreneurial lives compare to those shaped and scripted by the certainty and commitment to principled forms of the good advocated by other philosophical positions, such as deontology? This SI is dedicated to papers investigating this uneasy yet intimate relationship between ethics and entrepreneurship.

Different philosophical perspectives can offer unique insights into the interplay between ethics and entrepreneurship, including virtue ethics, care ethics, pragmatism, capabilities approaches, as well as deontology and phenomenology. Similarly, different schools in entrepreneurship studies, from early traditions in evolutionary economics or trait theory, to more recent perspectives associated with alertness to opportunity, emergence and creativity, and actualization, provide different stimulus for ethicists. While entrepreneurship is often associated with opportunity-seeking and value creation, its concern with seeking support from others, and with growing an organizational form that sustains the livelihood of others, extends its operations beyond economic and industrial narratives of profit, and product- and service innovation.

Entrepreneurial ventures are embedded within complex networks of stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, non-human systems, and communities. Navigating these relationships demands ethical judgment that balances competing interests, priorities, and values. Unlike managerial decision-making, which tends to rely on established protocols, systems, and formalized structures, entrepreneurial judgment occurs in a context of greater uncertainty and fluidity, where ethical considerations are threaded into the very fabric of entrepreneurial practice.

Entrepreneurs must establish trust, negotiate power dynamics, and create shared meaning among diverse stakeholders, all while remaining attuned to the broader societal and environmental implications of their actions. They continually navigate competing values, and face unpredictable consequences within 'spaces of ambiguity,' where loosened norms make ethical reasoning both precarious and generative. In such spaces, distinguishing a 'good reason' for action from simply 'a reason to act' carry significant personal, social and commercial resonance, raising fundamental questions about the nature of ethical responsibility in conditions of flux and uncertainty, about the requirement to follow rules or break them, about the intimacy between the social and ethical commitments inherent in entrepreneurship, and about the relationship between entrepreneurial flourishing and care.

If we can still speak of 'the entrepreneur,' it is as a figure that challenges the viability of the sovereign self, continually narrating identity through stories of venturing and novelty. The entrepreneurial self emerges through an ongoing process of becoming – an engagement with chance, contingency and creative responsiveness. The entrepreneur lives out an experimental existence, embracing uncertainty and 'becoming' through the act of venturing into the unknown, through proffering of alternatives, often oppositional ones. This insight invites deeper explorations of both how organizations are formed, and stakeholders are engaged in sustaining what we might call 'good shape' – a venture that remains dynamic yet coherent amidst uncertainty and change.

In bringing entrepreneurship and ethics into philosophical dialogue, each field can deepen its appreciation of itself and the other. Entrepreneurship studies can learn from how ethicists have conceptualized difference, authenticity, autonomy, duty, care and recognition. These ethical-philosophical concepts invite a deeper reflection on the responsibilities of entrepreneurs – not only towards stakeholders but towards the wider social and ecological systems in which they operate. In turn, ethical theorists can learn from entrepreneurship's philosophical examination of contingency, creativity, and emergent futures that foregrounds fluidity, moral luck, and improvisation.

Potential topics

• Philosophical Dimensions of Ethics: How do different philosophical traditions (e.g., virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, phenomenology, hermeneutics) inform our understanding of entrepreneurship as an ethical practice? How are traditions confirmed or transformed when ethics is viewed through an entrepreneurial lens?
• Phenomenology of the Entrepreneurial Experience: In what sense are entrepreneurial experiences of uncertainty, autonomy, and decision-making ethical, and how does phenomenology illuminate Kierkegaard's 'finitude' of lived reality?
• The Entrepreneur and Ethical Subjectivity: How can ethical theories of 'subjecthood', agency, embodiment, and 'self' inform understandings of the entrepreneur, and how might post-human ethics further enrich the question 'Who is the entrepreneur'?
• Ethics and Rule-Breaking: Ethically, what is the connection between following and breaking rules, and how might entrepreneurial theory enrich understandings of this connection?
• Stakeholder Relations and Trust: How do entrepreneurs navigate stakeholder dynamics and trust-building while pursuing ethical objectives and are these forms of trust akin to those envisaged in current ethical theorising?
• Entrepreneurship as Inherently Ethical or Unethical: Is entrepreneurship inherently ethical or exploitative, and how can these views inform a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurial ethics? How core are ethics to entrepreneurship?
• Entrepreneurship and Technological Mediation: In the digital age of machine protocols, does judgment still matter—and is entrepreneurship a break from, or reinvention of, the network, platform, and stack?
• Ethics, Value, and Entrepreneurial Goals: Can ethical theories of value and worth contribute to the framing of entrepreneurial goals and opportunity?
• Temporal Dimensions of Entrepreneurial Ethics: How do entrepreneurial decisions compare immediate gains with long-term ethical considerations? In what ways does the entrepreneurial relationship to time create unique ethical challenges and opportunities?

Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Full paper submission deadline

Yiji Su, Tongji University

Shaker A. Zahra, University of Minnesota

Vikas Kumar, University of Sydney

Sihong Wu, University of Auckland

The global entrepreneurial landscape is being reshaped by geopolitical tensions, realigning supply chains, technological disruption, digital progress, and long-term climate and demographic trends. As a leading engine of global economic growth, the Asia-Pacific is a critical arena in which these transformations unfold. This Collection aims to provide a platform for advancing theories, methodologies, and practices that enhance understanding of inclusive entrepreneurship in the region.

Potential topics

• Inclusive entrepreneurship in the Asia-Pacific region
• Entrepreneurial responses to geopolitical tensions
• Supply chain realignment and entrepreneurship
• Technological disruption and entrepreneurial innovation
• Digital progress and inclusive business models
• Climate and demographic trends affecting entrepreneurship
• Economic growth and inclusive entrepreneurship in Asia-Pacific

Timeline

• August 31, 2026: Submission deadline

Timeline

• October 1, 2027: Submission deadline

Timeline

• December 31, 2029: Submission deadline

Timeline

• September 1, 2026: Submission deadline

This special issue focuses on family business, entrepreneurship and corporate governance in the Pacific-Basin region. The issue invites research that examines the unique characteristics, challenges, and opportunities of family enterprises and their governance structures in this dynamic economic area.

Timeline

• December 31, 2025: Full paper submission deadline

This special issue calls for papers examining the intersection of innovation and entrepreneurship in high-cost economies. High-cost economies face unique challenges in maintaining competitiveness while managing elevated operational expenses, regulatory burdens, and labor costs. The issue seeks to understand how entrepreneurs and innovators navigate these constraints and leverage them as opportunities for creating sustainable business models and competitive advantages.

Timeline

• January 31, 2025: Submission deadline

Shuang Lu Frost, Aarhus University

Magdalena Markowska, King's College London

Kai Roland Green, Aarhus University

Kimberly Eddleston, Northeastern University

Alisa Jno-Charles, Babson College

Haibo Zhou, University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Ulla Hytti, University of Turku

According to the 2021 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, nearly half of early-stage entrepreneurs globally are raising children. These parent-entrepreneurs navigate a unique landscape where the demands of child-rearing directly intersect with the pressures of business creation and survival at the individual, family, business, and societal levels. The quest for work-family balance draws many entrepreneurs. Yet entrepreneurship often intensifies the work-family conflict it was meant to resolve, affecting both business performance and personal well-being. Motherhood and fatherhood thus play a critical yet underexplored role in shaping entrepreneurial motivations, practices, and outcomes. Understanding these dynamics is vital for entrepreneurial practice: it can inform the design of more effective support systems and guide policymakers in creating inclusive ecosystems that recognise the dual roles many founders play.

Addressing these dynamics requires looking beyond the individual entrepreneur to the broader social fabric in which parenthood and entrepreneurship are simultaneously enacted. Entrepreneurship is increasingly recognised as a socially embedded activity, shaped not only by market forces but also by identities, family roles, and regional contexts. Despite the prevalence of parenthood among entrepreneurs, scholarly exploration of its various forms and their impact on entrepreneurial life remains limited. While a growing body of research examines the relationship between motherhood and entrepreneurship, topics such as fatherhood, household dynamics, single parenthood, LGBTQ+ parenting, and the intersection of parenthood with diverse regional contexts remain largely uncharted.

This special issue welcomes both explanatory and causal research (examining drivers, outcomes, and resource endowments) and interpretive and social constructivist research (exploring narratives, identities, and discourses) on the relationship between parenthood and entrepreneurship. We believe these traditions jointly advance understanding of how parenthood shapes, and is shaped by, entrepreneurial activity, and that neither quantitative nor qualitative approaches alone are sufficient to capture the full complexity of this intersection. Contributions may draw on qualitative, quantitative, mixed-method, or conceptual approaches, and we particularly welcome longitudinal, comparative, and multilevel designs that are sensitive to how parental roles and regional contexts vary across time and place.

Research on motherhood and entrepreneurship has generated important insights into how women negotiate parental and professional identities. Concepts such as the 'mumpreneur' and motherhood as a springboard for entrepreneurial action have enriched our understanding. However, much of this work concentrates on a relatively narrow set of themes: principally work-family balance among entrepreneurial mothers in Western contexts. Equally, as new entrepreneurial forms emerge in digital spaces, such as 'tradwives' and female influencers, theories of entrepreneurial motherhood must be reaffirmed or redeveloped. We welcome studies that break new theoretical, contextual, or methodological ground in this area, moving beyond established findings to examine, for instance, how motherhood intersects with gender, race, class, disability, or migration status in shaping entrepreneurial trajectories.

Fathers constitute half of all parents yet remain a surprisingly rare subject of investigation within entrepreneurship studies. While entrepreneurial fathers are known to enact various forms of 'entrepreneurial masculinity' just as mothers also do in relation to hegemonic masculinity typical for the Western social representation of entrepreneurs, the field has given little attention to how emerging models of 'involved fatherhood' reshape men's personal and professional priorities. The nascent concept of the 'dadpreneur' hints at new configurations of paternal and entrepreneurial identity, while cultural representations in television and popular film offer rich material for examining entrepreneurial father figures and evolving masculinities. We invite contributions that explore how fatherhood shapes entrepreneurial masculinity, how non-normative masculinities find expression in entrepreneurial settings, and how care-oriented models of masculinity influence venture decisions.

Several family forms have received little or no attention from entrepreneurship scholars. Single-parent entrepreneurs face distinct resource constraints and identity negotiations. Lesbian, gay, and queer parents navigating entrepreneurship encounter unique relational dynamics, while non-traditional household arrangements such as polyamorous parenting raise novel questions about how familial configurations interact with venture creation. Future studies could also consider family diversity, including entrepreneuring mothers/fathers in families with children with additional needs or other dependents requiring care. This special issue welcomes contributions that illuminate these underexplored configurations and their implications for entrepreneurial identity, motivation, and practice.

The dynamics between parents and between parents and children deserve further study. A partner's self-employment status influences the decision to become self-employed, and household egalitarianism positively affects mothers' entrepreneurial entry. Fathers, too, can be drawn into entrepreneurship by a spouse's business activity, and parental entrepreneurs shape children's career orientations. We invite research that examines the relational and negotiated nature of entrepreneurial decisions within households.

The impact of parenthood extends to the 'silent stakeholders' of the entrepreneurial journey: the children. While existing literature touches on family business succession, there is a pressing need to examine how entrepreneurial propensity and behaviours are transmitted across generations outside the traditional family firm context. Important questions remain about which specific resources, such as financial capital, self-efficacy, risk profiles, social capital, and family-to-business enrichment, are passed from entrepreneurial parents to their children. Yet entrepreneurial households are not merely channels of resource transmission; they are also sites of socialization and relational dynamics. For instance, interparental interaction patterns and parenting styles can shape children's perceptions of entrepreneurship as a desirable life path and influence children's traits closely linked to entrepreneurial behavior. Therefore, we also invite studies that go beyond transmission to explore children's lived experiences, identity formation, and well-being within entrepreneurial households, and explore how the development of a child in such a household is situated in complex systems where macro-level factors (national culture, welfare policies) filter through meso-level contexts (industry norms) to shape micro-level family dynamics and child outcomes.

Parenthood is a socially and culturally constructed experience shaped significantly by institutional frameworks. The entrepreneurial pathways of parents are heavily influenced by national and regional welfare-state policies, particularly those governing parental leave and affordable childcare. In liberal market economies such as the United States, where state-subsidised childcare is limited, many parents, especially mothers, are pushed into necessity-driven entrepreneurship as a strategy for creating flexibility. In social-democratic welfare states such as those in Scandinavia, comprehensive benefits tied to full-time employment can create high opportunity costs for starting a business, yet generous paid parental leave can simultaneously serve as a crucial incubation period for venture development. In many developing countries, where formal state support may be weak, extended family networks providing childcare become a critical determinant of a parent's ability to pursue entrepreneurial activities. We therefore encourage comparative and context-sensitive research that examines how prevailing policy regimes, cultural norms, and regional ecosystems support or constrain parent-entrepreneurs in different settings.

The special issue welcomes contributions drawing on several theoretical perspectives. Gender and care frameworks illuminate how gendered expectations around caregiving shape access to entrepreneurial resources, legitimacy, and identity. Relevant frameworks include role congruity theory, which illuminates the tension between communal expectations of parenthood and the agentic demands of entrepreneurship, and stereotype threat theory, which helps explain how awareness of gender-based stereotypes can suppress entrepreneurial confidence and performance among both mothers and fathers. Moving beyond classical gender theories, more recent doing gender theorizing and approaches invite scholars to novel understandings of how doing gender and enacting multiple masculinities and femininities might affect both men and women entrepreneurs, as well as their ventures and households. Embeddedness and context perspectives examine how regional ecosystems, welfare regimes, and institutional environments mediate the relationship between parenthood and entrepreneurship. Contributions may draw on the family embeddedness perspective, which positions the household as a critical unit shaping entrepreneurial resource mobilisation, as well as institutional theory to examine how formal and informal rules govern the compatibility of parenting and venture creation across contexts. Stigma theory may also prove insightful in understanding how certain parental identities, including single parenthood, LGBTQ+ parenting, and other non-normative family structures, shape entrepreneurial legitimacy and identity management. Identity and discourse perspectives explore how parent-entrepreneurs construct, negotiate, and communicate their identities. Useful lenses include entrepreneurial identity, social identity theory, sensemaking frameworks, and family systems theory, which together offer tools for examining how entrepreneurs integrate or struggle to integrate parental and entrepreneurial roles into a coherent self-concept.

Potential topics

• How do parent-entrepreneurs negotiate entrepreneurial and parental identities across gender, culture, and sexuality?
• How do emerging models of fatherhood/motherhood shape entrepreneurship?
• What role does founder identity transformation play in the transition to entrepreneurial parenthood?
• How do single parents, LGBTQ+ parents, and individuals in non-normative family forms experience entrepreneurial entry and growth?
• How is role conflict or role enrichment experienced differently by mothers and fathers in entrepreneurial families?
• How do partner dynamics and household egalitarianism shape entrepreneurial decisions?
• What specific resources (cognitive, financial, human, social capital) are transmitted from entrepreneurial parents to children?
• What are the lived experiences and well-being outcomes of children growing up in entrepreneurial households?
• How do macro-level factors (e.g., economic instability, policy frameworks) interact with household dynamics to influence children's outcomes and orientations?
• In what ways do interparental interactions and household role negotiations shape children's perception of entrepreneurship?
• How do entrepreneurial households balance opportunity creation with potential stress or instability for children?
• How do regional policies, parental leave systems, and childcare infrastructure shape entrepreneurial entry, continuation, and exit among parents?
• How do parent-entrepreneurs' experiences differ across welfare regimes (liberal, social-democratic, conservative, developing-country contexts)?
• What role do informal institutions and extended family networks play in enabling or constraining parental entrepreneurship?
• How does the portrayal of parent-entrepreneurs in media, public discourse, and cultural narratives affect entrepreneurial motives and sources of satisfaction?
• How does the self-representation and identity work of parent-entrepreneurs on social media and in entrepreneurial communities contribute to their business success and well-being?
• How do discursive ideals of 'good motherhood' or 'involved fatherhood' constrain or enable entrepreneurial action?
• What are the longitudinal effects of entrepreneurship on family well-being, and vice versa?
• How does parenthood influence innovation, creativity, or business performance?
• How do entrepreneurial career trajectories differ based on family status, parenting roles, and the timing of parenthood relative to venture creation?

Timeline

• June 1, 2026: Abstract deadline
• July 1, 2027: Manuscript deadline

Bingbing Ge, Lancaster University Management School

Hanqing Fang, Missouri University of Science and Technology

Alfredo De Massis, D'Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara

Junsheng Dou, Zhejiang University

Winnie Qian Peng, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

This Special Issue aims to advance theoretical and empirical discussions on Chinese family businesses and entrepreneurial families by diving deep into them as contexts that challenge prevailing Western theories and as generative contexts for indigenous theorizing in family entrepreneurship. Scholarship has increasingly highlighted the importance of context in shaping entrepreneurial phenomena and emphasized entrepreneurship as a socially constructed process. Yet dominant frameworks in family business and family entrepreneurship—such as socioemotional wealth (SEW), agency theory, stewardship, and the resource-based view (RBV)—were largely developed in Western institutional and cultural environments characterized by individualism, contractual governance, and relatively liberal market economies. When these frameworks are applied to Chinese family enterprises, their underlying assumptions about self-interest, agency costs, governance logics, and resource valuation often prove misaligned, producing puzzling or contradictory findings.

Given Chinese firms' global importance, their distinctive development patterns are particularly salient in the current geopolitical context, where family enterprises sit at the center of international business while simultaneously adapting to uncertainties, trade frictions, and institutional turbulence. These dynamics underscore a critical theoretical challenge: do the concepts, relationships, and models embedded in Western theories hold when applied to Chinese family firms, or do they require reformulation?

This gap presents an opportunity for indigenous theorizing that takes the cultural, institutional, demographic, and geopolitical specificities of Chinese family enterprises as central explanatory mechanisms. Addressing this challenge is essential not only for advancing understanding of Chinese family enterprises, but also for broadening entrepreneurship and family business scholarship at individual, organizational, and institutional levels.

Chinese culture exerts profound yet often underexplored influence on entrepreneurial and organizational behaviors, shaping not only decision-making processes but also long-term strategic trajectories. Understanding Chinese culture amongst Chinese family entrepreneurship can lead to an understanding of counterintuitive business decisions. A refocus on families and practices provides opportunities to study cultural influence in-depth and provides more opportunities for indigenous theorization. Such contributions need to go beyond surface-level correlations to uncover the causal mechanisms through which cultural values, norms, and practices influence familial and business decisions.

Studies of family business succession often assume families select heirs to optimize competence, legitimacy, or continuity, aligning family goals with firm performance. In China, however, Confucian patriarchy redirects goals toward filial obligation and patrilineal continuity. The 'Fu Er Dai' stigma, commonly associating successors with overreliance on family wealth and a tendency to squander resources, undermines legitimacy irrespective of competence. The One-Child Policy eliminates sibling competition, making succession inevitable rather than strategic. These features reveal that family goals may be culturally prescribed and demographically constrained, rather than universally linked to specific dimensions.

Tradition is a central yet less focused concept in family business and entrepreneurship research, where family orientations interplay with business practices. Tradition, intertwined with Chinese culture, strongly impacts and leads to unique business behaviors and strategies. Chinese family firms frequently mobilize traditions, rituals, narratives, and historical legacies as resources, practicing 'innovation through tradition.' These resources derive value not from novelty but from cultural continuity, identity reinforcement, tradition, and legitimacy, expanding RBV assumptions about what constitutes valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources.

In Chinese family firms, Confucian role ethics and guanxi obligations often suppress overt opportunism while simultaneously creating new relational hazards—nepotism, reciprocal obligations, and political entanglement. However, such networks are complicated in their own right, combining several at times competing institutional logics, including familial, social, market, regional, national, and international. Decisions and strategies made by these family enterprises thus emerge not from contract enforcement but from navigating culturally-defined relational obligations.

Chinese family enterprises are entering a critical historical juncture. Legacies of privatization and the One-Child Policy have created unique generational dynamics, with many firms now navigating first-to-second generation transitions under conditions of social stigma and low succession success rates. At the same time, these enterprises operate amid escalating geopolitical tensions, rapid technological shifts, and intensifying institutional turbulence. These challenges make Chinese family firms not only economically significant but also theoretically generative, providing a natural laboratory for advancing new insights into entrepreneurial continuity, resilience, and adaptation.

This Special Issue calls for research that goes beyond descriptive accounts to theorize the causal processes shaping Chinese family enterprises. By foregrounding their distinctive institutional, cultural, demographic, and geopolitical conditions, we aim to generate contributions that not only deepen understanding of Chinese family entrepreneurship but also broaden the theoretical scope of family business research globally. We encourage multi-level, longitudinal, and mechanism-focused studies—empirical or conceptual—that can inform comparative theorizing across contexts. We welcome empirical papers (both qualitative and quantitative), conceptual papers, and literature review papers that shed light on family firms, entrepreneurial families, and family offices in the Chinese context.

Potential topics

• Indigenous Theorizing and Concept Development: Building indigenous theories rooted in Chinese cultural, institutional, and geopolitical conditions, drawing from Confucian ethics, guanxi logics, or dynastic continuity as explanatory mechanisms
• Entrepreneurship as Constraint and Renewal: Exploring how institutional and cultural elements such as filial obligation, demographic legacies, and social perceptions shape entrepreneurial succession
• History-informed research: Taking a history-informed perspective to understand entrepreneurship and family business practices, including innovation through tradition
• Regional Heterogeneity: Incorporating regional institutional heterogeneity as a central explanatory factor in family entrepreneurship across China's varied development models and cultural norms
• Purpose in Chinese Business Families: Theorizing Chinese family offices and their approaches to transgenerational wealth through multi-enterprise portfolios and informal arrangements
• Gender and Patriarchal Paradoxes: Theorizing gendered pathways of leadership specific to the Chinese context and female successors' roles in patriarchal traditions
• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Communal Orientation: Understanding how cultural embeddedness shapes responsibility, CSR, and legitimacy in Chinese family firms
• Geopolitical Turbulence as Institutional Hybridity: Theorizing how family firms navigate global turbulence under conditions of institutional hybridity and restricted learning opportunities

Timeline

• February 1, 2026: Extended abstract submission deadline for workshop participation
• March 1, 2026: Workshop acceptance notification
• April 11, 2026: Abstract deadline
• April 11, 2026: ERD Special Issue Workshop at Zhejiang University, China
• September 1, 2026: Full paper submission deadline