Introductory Chapter: Entrepreneurship as a Trend and as a Challenge

1. Introduction

Entrepreneurship is a powerful attitude that, in such a way, in the last years, has become a discipline increasingly transversal to different areas of knowledge, science, and organizations. We can see some examples like teaching students to acquire principles and tools to start a successful business, filling a gap in the business school curriculum by addressing start-ups and small business contexts, motivating and training to obtain an entrepreneurial behavior, developing communities, and contributing a role to the spread of entrepreneurship across societies [1]. Promotion of entrepreneurship has a vital role to play in improving the competitiveness of small business and enhancing employment opportunities [2].

In front of such reality, the entrepreneurship must have a necessity to be operationalized more and more. The necessity opportunity conjugation represents a reflection source for future research on the determinants and outcomes of entrepreneurship, helping the researchers to find a model who works in two cycles, pro-cycle and counter-cycle, to aim more success on entrepreneurial work, namely, during crisis periods [3].

As a transversal discipline, the entrepreneurship grows in many advances even more interactive than ever, making a research approach to prosocial challenges search to empower people and increase the economy through new emerging trends such as economic learning, uncertainty, judgment, opportunities, social motivations, and incentives, to continue to offer starting points and insights for contemporary work [4] and provide the necessary impetus and intellectual basis for human initiatives [2].

The knowledge represents the most important role for entrepreneurship research. This is, indisputably, a collaborative approach between different sectors of economic activity that links innovation, learning, and entrepreneurship, helping people and organizations to be better on this attitude practice [5].

Therefore, entrepreneurship can be a model for interdisciplinary studies and researches, increasing dynamism on schools, innovating pedagogical and experiential learning procedures, and approaching generations and communities for change [1].

As a fact, to turn the operative entrepreneurship in academic entrepreneurship brings new opportunities to universities, and the entrepreneurship models turn more strategic with more entrepreneurial activities and bring more types of stakeholders, to redesign the entrepreneurial ecosystems, joining research and transfer activities [6].

Researches in entrepreneurship enhance opportunities and qualities of studies for a global action [7]; it expanses in an explosive global growth [20] that entrepreneurs involved in innovative entrepreneurship are more adaptable for growth expectations, with subjective values playing a direct and indirect role in entrepreneurs’ expectations in an organization growth [8].

Still, according with this author, the entrepreneurial experience duration moderates the relationship between strategic orientation and confidence in innovation, and it is so stronger for inexperienced entrepreneurs and experienced entrepreneurs that tend to be more cautious about their growing expectations.

By the way, small nations grew at a faster rate than developed nations between 2002 and 2013; this is because the economic globalization and entrepreneurship contribute, day by day, to growth and development, and this impact shifts from efficiency-driven to innovation-driven development and mobility that, on the other hand, promotes the investment and the technological growth, increasing trade and multilateral alliances enhancing global competition [9].

Entrepreneurship has also been a motive for men and women bringing together in equal opportunities, positioning, and organizational justice, throughout the globe. Education through entrepreneurship also adds value to people, as well as people being encouraged to help each other, to seek how to develop the society, and acquire positive values, discouraging the corruption [10].

Especially women, through the example of friends, family, mentors, and by their own self-experience, try to give an example of good entrepreneurship through the acquisition of entrepreneurial competencies. So, the policies that support the gender proximity to increase the entrepreneurship are an even more reality [11].

Also, the entrepreneurship is more and more technological. Many industries use big data bases, strongly supported on knowledge capital, for growth through innovation and where products and processes are often evaluated within knowledge-based frameworks [12].

For example, in medicine, the digital health has been improving the doctor-patient relation that makes a reduction both in operating costs and in extraordinary costs, and this is harnessed by digital entrepreneurship that has taken the opportunities to create new good medicine practices in the development of the relation such as the “Digital Health Innovation Roadmap,” a digital encompassing model for all medical areas [13].

About this, technology is useful for entrepreneurship; the free open data is a good weapon to obtain information, increase the entrepreneurship experiences, and cause elevated impact on economic growth, innovation, empowerment, and new or improved products and services, in such a way that open data competitions can benefit and motivate entrepreneurs to participate in hackathons and start-ups [14].

To get strategies for fostering the entrepreneurial mind-set in students, the use of serious games is a success case, inside and outside the schools. Virtual reality games help students acquire entrepreneurial skills as well as enable them to learn how to negotiate by acquiring decision-making skills. However, for this reality to materialize, it is necessary to obtain the didactic resources necessary to support different learning strategies [15].

Beyond the future, the entrepreneurship will be sustainable if a mentality change occurs that concerns dominant approaches to entrepreneurial action [16], central to all business venturing [17] and very important for academic knowledge development [18] to overcome the following challenges [19]: learning vs. resources, induction vs. autonomy, and co-alignment vs. co-creation.