Abstract
Due to the numerous benefits that individuals, communities and nations can reap from the practice of entrepreneurship, in recent decades, policymakers have sought to promote entrepreneurship and the actors engaged in its practices. Nonetheless, since the 1990s the failure rates of entrepreneurial ventures have steadily remained excessive. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted to understand the factors driving entrepreneurship success. The identified drivers can be categorised as intrinsic, such as entrepreneurial orientation and motivation, and extrinsic, such as family support and robust entrepreneurial ecosystems.
More recently, a new style of entrepreneurship has emerged wherein entrepreneurs have capitalised on the remarkable capabilities of digital technologies to design digital artefacts that capture value. This style, lying at the intersection of digitalisation and entrepreneurship, is known as digital entrepreneurship. Notably, despite digital technologies’ merits, high failure rates have persisted. Furthermore, the distinctive nature of digital entrepreneurship imposed an urgent need to understand the specific drivers of its success.
Consequently, entrepreneurship scholars have recently sought to verify whether various recognised drivers of success valid for general entrepreneurship might also apply to the digital context. However, the digital economy as a distinctive context provides opportunities for recognising unique drivers of success. Unfortunately, drivers similar to smart city initiatives and the publication of open data in modern research have remained scarce.
This thesis answers the call to streamline the process of promoting successful digital entrepreneurship by focusing on three explicitly digital-related drivers of successful digital entrepreneurship – digital leadership, implementation and resilience – and using a case study methodology unearths many useful findings.
The previous research on digital entrepreneurship has primarily focused on the intersection of digitalisation and entrepreneurship; in contrast, investigations of digital
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transformation have mostly examined established companies. Overall, whilst achieving their goals, digital start-ups have transformed entrepreneurial and organisational processes, altered and transformed traditional business models, and formed new industries, such as the metaverse. Additionally, digital start-ups must develop dynamic capabilities that allow a swift reaction to dynamic environments, with these capabilities evolving alongside the digital start-up’s growth stages. Furthermore, continuous learning and improvement, a key dynamic capability, should be emphasised as it involves iterative processes that facilitate navigating the challenges of the digital economy whilst aligning with the principles of Lean Startup Methodology.
In addition to providing more explicitly digital economy-related drivers of success as a theoretical contribution, this research offers a strong potential to reduce digital start-ups’ excessive failure rates and increase the effectiveness of policymakers’ efforts to promote digital entrepreneurial initiatives.