Revista Galega de Economía

Entrepreneurship in the age of the digital economy.

2023-09-01T12:45:18+02:00

Examining the relationships between Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, and e-Commerce. Evidence from Iberian and Scandinavian Countries

2023-09-01T12:45:18+02:00

Digitisation is a phenomenon that inevitably affects companies and economies. Consequently, the virtual market seems an excellent alternative for aspiring entrepreneurs. Recent statistics precisely point to accelerated growth of e-commerce. Indeed, this and entrepreneurship are business tools that allow a new dynamic in the market. However, recent research has barely explored the relationship between entrepreneurship and e-commerce, so this study contributes to the literature by filling the gap.

In light of the above, this study has used several indicators from two groups of countries, namely Scandinavia, in broad terms (Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland), and Iberia (Portugal and Spain) from the years 2012 to 2020. The Panel Corrected Standard Errors models have been used for the econometric treatment of the data. The findings confirm the bidirectional causality between entrepreneurship and e-commerce. In addition, from a widerperspective of entrepreneurship, the paper also reveals that intrapreneurship based on Research and Development (R&D) is an e-commerce driver. Therefore, this study opens up a new discussion and provides relevant support for the theoretical framework and a valuable contribution to the scarce literature on the relationship between entrepreneurship and e-commerce.

The use of sales technology by sales people as an information source and stimulant for intrapreneurship

2023-09-01T12:45:18+02:00

Digitization has changed the role of salespeople and, consequently, the dynamics of their operations at the interface between the supplier and the customer. Currently, a salesperson is often called upon to solve customer queries, which implies taking on the role of intrapreneur to internally create a solution. This study contributes to the literature by filling a gap regarding intrapreneurial salespeople and their uses of sales technology. This research focuses on the intrapreneurship of salespeople and explicitly investigates its antecedents. The structural equation modelling technique has been chosen as it is considered to be the most appropriate one for the analysis. Research data from 565 Portuguese salespeople reveals that their use of sales technology influences their intrapreneurship behaviour thanks to information systems. Last of all, this study adds invaluable knowledge to the literature, gives valuable insight to sales managers and proposes future lines of research.

Integrating the social support theory and technology acceptance model of social commerce websites

2023-09-01T12:45:18+02:00

The expansion of social commerce websites has gradually transformed most people’s lives in terms of social interactions during leisure time. Communication has been made easier due to the advancement of information communication technology due to the fact that information sources can efficiently assist in providing the information required. Nevertheless, the possibility struggling to understand online content exists as the information may have inaccuracies and biases. By combining the technology acceptance model (TAM) and social support theory (SST), this study has developed a detailed purchase intention model to analyse relationships related to social commerce websites. Trust has been examined as the mediator in this research. The study has employed an online quantitative approach and has conducted non-probability (convenience) sampling to recruit 392 respondents. The findings demonstrate that different SS forms (emotional and informational) contain significant relationships with the TAM, trust and purchase intention. Nonetheless, perceived usefulness and purchase intention reveal insignificant relationships. Meanwhile, trust significantly mediates the association between SS and TAM constructs in this proposed model. The results also show that the proposed model has achieved a good fit and clearly explains each relationship. Therefore, the integration and extension of constructs may serve as future research paths. The findings could also be applied by marketeers and practitioners when developing social commerce websites.

Social entrepreneur management of personal network linkages: Does the use of social media increase resources?

2023-09-01T12:45:19+02:00

Research on social entrepreneurship highlights how important resources are since a lack of them may undermine a social organization's activity and mission. To maintain or increase the amount of resources available, the social entrepreneur needs to manage his/her personal network linkages via social media to connect with current stakeholders and seek new ones. This research uses primary data collected from a survey of social organizations to see whether the social entrepreneur’s network reliance on social media increases the amount of resources available for the social organization. The primary data was collected between January and March 2020. The results obtained from 313 social organizations in Portugal show that the social entrepreneur’s network linkages have a direct and an indirect effect. Directly, managing the social entrepreneur’s linkages with stakeholders seems to attract resources for the social organization. The indirect effects occur via social media usage, firstly, by seeking and establishing relationships with new stakeholders, and secondly, by managing the personal linkages with the current network of stakeholders.

From hashtag to cashback: Success determinants in crowdfunders' user behavior

2023-09-01T12:45:19+02:00

Crowdfunding is a popular approach for entrepreneurs to obtain financial support and has therefore gained importance in the literature and practice in recent years. The communication behavior of starters that lead to the success of a campaign will be summarized and expanded by new findings. As a theoretical added value, this article offers the first attempt to transfer communication theories to the field of reward-based crowdfunding to reveal success determinants in crowdfunders user behavior. The purpose of this paper is to give practical recommendations to starters on how to run a campaign successfully and, more generally, on how they can make full use of social media. By analyzing the dataset of crowdfunding campaigns from Startnext, the largest German-speaking reward-based crowdfunding platform, new success factors are identified using multivariate analysis methods. The results show that social media can offer significant value for businesspeople in terms of marketing if it is used strategically and frequently.