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Introduction
Digital entrepreneurs with their new ways of doing business had an enormous effect on the whole world, especially in the last decade. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple not only completely changed the business world, but also shaped the way we communicate with each other in everyday life. At this stage, we live in a world of digitalisation, where artificial intelligence can be used to enhance the quality of decisions and our perception of the reality can be augmented to broaden our perspective in many ways. Developing a device is faster, when its digital twin shows errors even before the physical product is completed. Computing, storing and researching information is not only becoming easier, but also more flexible and economical as cloud services are continuing to evolve and the internet transforms towards the so-called Internet of Things (IoT). With blockchain, the transition to the “Internet of Values” has just begun. By 2020, IoT technology is expected to be implemented in 95 per cent of electronics for new product designs and a worldwide volume of $1bn of legalised cryptocurrencies will be traded in the banking industry (Richter, Kraus and Bouncken, 2015; Panetta, 2017).
As the digitalisation phenomenon causes various implications through rapid and transformative change, it is relevant for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship researchers to be aware of related outcomes and connections and identify emerging opportunities on business. In this paper we understand entrepreneurship as “the process of designing, launching and running a new business” (Hsieh and Wu, 2018, p. 1) with its distinct characteristic of “new value creation” (Hull et al., 2007, p. 293), though entrepreneurship is more than starting up a new business. Applying a holistic perspective, entrepreneurial activity arises of the interplay of institutions (e.g. education or business development), stakeholders and entrepreneurs themselves (Palmer et al., 2018).
Digitalisation is not reduced to single new developments in entrepreneurship. Rather, business models face a huge shift towards entire digital environments. In addition to new businesses created out of arising opportunities due to digitalisation, existing branches and businesses alter from offline to online business – establishing “digital entrepreneurship” as a novel form of entrepreneurial activities. In this paper “digital entrepreneurship” is understood as “a subcategory of entrepreneurship in which some or all of what would...