Working Groups

Transnational entrepreneurs are migrants who create a business while maintaining the business-related linkage between different countries (mostly their home and host countries). Different types of people can engage in transnational entrepreneurial activities, including highly-skilled migrants, labor migrants, expatriates & repatriates, refugees, returnees, and the diaspora. Due to the globalization and the recent technological advancement in the communication and transportation industries, the number of global migrants has drastically increased over the last decades, and the nature and the forms of migration have become more and more diverse. Migrants have unique human and social capital in different geographical locations and are able to combine it through their rich cognitive capacity to create idiosyncratic entrepreneurial value in a transnational setting.

Facebook, Google, Apple, Tesla, airbnb, Uber, twitter, Dropbox: all of these highly successful companies have started as innovative start-ups and all come from Silicon Valley. Why does this small region in California create such a high density of innovative business concepts? The answer to this question lies in the contextual consideration of start-ups and their entrepreneurs. They do not operate in a vacuum, but in interaction with their environment. Thus, the high density of innovative and scalable start-ups in Silicon Valley can be explained by the successfully established local Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem is a spatially limited region which, through the work of networked independent actors and regional resources, offers a supportive environment for entrepreneurship and thus provides favourable conditions for the development of start-ups.

Start-ups often face particular challenges and typical bottlenecks (e.g. lack of specific skills,  resources and administrative support, weak business networks). Business incubators and accelerators support entrepreneurs to overcome these challenges by providing targeted resources and services such as trainings for personal and business development, funding opportunities, working space, mentorships and consulting. Particularly scaling up the startup is a delicate and risky endeavor with challenges that often can only be mastered by highly professional support of well-developed accelerators. Obviously startups need a beneficial business environment which allows them to develop and grow. These efforts result in a start-up survival rates 40%-50% higher than the survival rate without the help of incubators and accelerators. 

Entrepreneurship as a field of teaching has become more and more popular since their humble beginning in the early 1970’s in the USA. Through increasing globalization and digitalization, there is a continuous need for further development of new teaching and learning approaches, learning philosophies and new entrepreneurship education policies. Since the emergence of entrepreneurship education, there has been a great increase in programs and courses for entrepreneurship education. These offers are not only available in universities and other Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) but also gradually find application in vocational schools. Starting with rather traditional entrepreneurship education that focuses on building skills and teaching the understanding of different aspects of venture creation, it has now shifted to a more creative, interactive and student-centered model

Established companies usually go the way of consolidating their formerly new business in the direction of a core business and concentrating their activities on it. As a result, there is a risk of losing the exploratory tension that leads to the generation of new business and which plays a decisive role in determining future viability in turbulent times.

Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) and Corporate Venturing (CV) describe approaches used by established companies, but also by more mature start-ups. They use methods and concepts from the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation management to innovate existing business models and new business fields, in particular by developing new services. Examples include research cooperations, innovation laboratories, open innovation formats and corporate venture capital.