Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Emerging Economies

ALVAREZ, S.; MESQUITA, L.; VASSOLO, R. S.

Entrepreneurial Strategies: New Technologies in emerging Markets

Blackwell

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2006; p. 1 - 7

The evolving 21st century may well be termed a time of uncertainty. Cycles of boom and bust in the rising global competitive landscape have presented firms with complexities and increasing difficulties to predict the future, as new technologies, products and methods of production are destroyed and replaced by even newer ones. Such dramatic changes have led practitioners to broaden their speculation about emerging trends in management, organization and strategy, often questioning the adequacies of practices hailed in recent years. Emerging managerial practices are often found to be astoundingly dissimilar and habitually conflicting; yet the essential matter for managers today still seems to run down to one thing: coping with dramatic uncertainty (Barkema, Baum, & Mannix, 2002). Paradoxically while uncertain conditions have their own unique managerial challenges, these conditions also foster unique situations and opportunities that can be exploited by entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial firms (Audretsch, 1995). Entrepreneurship and innovation have come to be perceived as engines of economic and social development in many nations throughout the global competitive landscape (Acs & Audretsch, 2003; Holcombe, 2003). In fact, entrepreneurship an innovation have become essential managerial features for young and old firms, for large and small firms, for service companies and manufacturing firms as well as high-technology ventures (Thomke, 2003). Thus, because the very essence of entrepreneurship and innovation in these firms relates to identifying and exploiting new environmental conditions where new goods and services can satisfy evolving needs in the market (Meyer, Neck, & Meeks, 2002), it is not surprising that the importance of entrepreneurship and the management of innovation has grown overtime, at par with the evolving complexity of the new global competitive landscape. While an increasing number of scholarly and managerial publications address the phenomena of entrepreneurship and innovation, it is unclear how these many different sources of uncertainty, so pervasive in emerging economies, shape and affect entrepreneurial opportunities as well as how they affect entrepreneurial decision making. Understanding such link can be not only beneficial to multinationals entering emerging markets through wholly owned investments or partnerships but also to national entrepreneurs and public policy makers. In order to shed more light on such link, we have crafted this book. Specifically, our goal is to help academics, policy makers and business practitioners understand how the different conditions of uncertainty in emerging economies affect entrepreneurial opportunities in the market place, as well as how entrepreneur-managers navigate through these emerging market specific conditions.