Digital Entrepreneurship: Research and Practice

Digital entrepreneurship is broadly defined as creating new ventures and transforming existing businesses by developing novel digital technologies and/or novel usage of such technologies, (European Commission, 2015). Digital entrepreneurship has been viewed as a critical pillar for economic growth, job creation and innovation by many countries including the Member States of the European Union. We argue that a nation's digital entrepreneurial capacity depends largely on digital entrepreneurial behaviour, culture, and strategies as well as a supportive innovation ecosystem in which governments, industry, business, educational institutions and NGOs (non-government organizations) work together. Therefore, a holistic and integrative approach is needed. This study aims to explore the emerging concept of digital entrepreneurship from multiple disciplinary perspectives, namely, information technology and systems, entrepreneurship and management, as well as contextual political/legal and socioeconomic factors and their impacts in a systemic and integrative way. For that purpose, the paper develops a conceptual model to study digital entrepreneurship drawing on current literature and three well-established theories – social network theory, social capital theory and institutional theory. The model addresses five fundamental research questions of digital entrepreneurship, thus leading to a better understanding of the concept and practice of digital entrepreneurship.