The Butterfly Effect for MSMEs

The Butterfly Effect for MSMEs

The Butterfly Effect for MSMEs

Monday, March, 2, 2020

The Butterfly Effect for MSMEs

Monday, March, 2, 2020

Can Small Changes in Entrepreneurship Lead to New Global Outcomes?

What does the “I” in globalization represent? Perhaps it is the individual small business owner, trying to eke out a living. The incubation of innovation by institutions triples the “I” as universities and foundations that support university research establish formal operations designed to help individuals who are potential entrepreneurs actually initiate entrepreneurial ventures. Or it might be investment innovations designed to increase profits for financial institutions.
 
An underlying metaphor for all of the above is known as “the butterfly effect.” In its best-known form, the butterfly effect shows how the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil has a tiny (but crucial) effect on the wind in the immediate vicinity. This, in turn, has a stronger effect on wind patterns and, ultimately, on weather. The final effect, carried out after a long series of increasingly strong impacts, is to create a tornado in Texas. Consider how each of the following actual and potential butterfly effects, represent one or another interpretation of the “I” in global (Read more…).
The Other Half: State, Challenges, and Action Items for the Realization of Women Entrepreneurial Opportunities Worldwide

The Other Half: State, Challenges, and Action Items for the Realization of Women Entrepreneurial Opportunities Worldwide

The Other Half: State, Challenges, and Action Items for the Realization of Women Entrepreneurial Opportunities Worldwide

Monday, February, 24, 2020

The Other Half: State, Challenges, and Action Items for the Realization of Women Entrepreneurial Opportunities Worldwide

Monday, February, 24, 2020

Is there Systemic Bias Towards Segregated Gender Roles in Society that is Constraining Women Potential in Entrepreneurship?

According to the United Nations, the world population reached 7.6 billion in 2017. About half, or 49.55 percent, were female (United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs, 2017). The fact that the gender demographics on the planet are balanced, compounded by the recent announcement that most countries have achieved gender parity in primary education (UNICEF, 2018) should be cause for optimism. However, these numbers are quickly obscured by the realization that disparities still remain at the other education grades, which disproportionately favor males.

President James Madison once stated that “education is the foundation of civil liberties.” Therefore, this gender unbalanced state of affairs might also escalate to the structure of several other institutions, including public and private sector activities, and the distribution of entrepreneurial opportunities.In this brief report, we review selected gender indicators across countries, and then compare them with entrepreneurial indicators in an attempt to understand the distribution of business opportunities across economies. After reviewing the general numbers, we focus on key challenges and practical recommendations for action (Read more…).

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 2

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 2

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 2

Sunday, February, 23, 2020

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 2

Sunday, February, 23, 2020

Humane Entrepreneurship is More than Just a Label

As humans, we tend to label everything; we love to define things to help things make sense or to grasp at understanding. But a label is so short, and people are expected to make a judgment, decision, or grasp an idea based on just a couple of words. But there might be so much more to something than just it’s label. There might be an entire concept wrapped up neatly within the packaging of those 2 or 3 words. Words like Humane Entrepreneurship.

What comes to mind when you read those two words—Humane Entrepreneurship? Some might just dismiss it as yet another business model in a world full of ever-changing and competitive business ideas. Some may associate it with a good cause or general humanitarian efforts. Yet Humane Entrepreneurship is more than just a label. It’s a concept that encompasses a whole idea.

What is the concept of Humane Entrepreneurship?

Humane Entrepreneurship as a concept promotes the ideas of human and corporate growth played out simultaneously, as well as protection of and the responsible use of natural resources. When the concept of Humane Entrepreneurship becomes a culture in a company, it influences the innovation performance through, not only attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior, but also company-wide management practices, processes, and protocols. Decision-making within the company would be based on what is good for its employees, its business, and the environment all at the same time.

When companies adopt the concept of Humane Entrepreneurship, they are starting a positive cycle (also known as a virtuous cycle) within, a cycle that keeps itself going to the benefit of the company and its employees. It begins with entrepreneurship and well-managed leadership which establishes a company culture or environment. This positive environment encourages, enthusiastically looks for, and nurtures innovation from its employees. That innovation leads to an increased financial performance by the company, which in turn encourages new job creation, which then leads back to entrepreneurship, beginning the cycle once again. Similar to a sustained natural cycle like the water cycle (rain fill bodies of water, sun evaporates the water, water vapor condenses into clouds, clouds produce rain), the components of this virtuous cycle are able feed off of each other and continue to produce good results, allowing the cycle to sustain itself long-term.

Humane Entrepreneurship from a scientific and research standpoint:

From a science and research standpoint, the concept of Humane Entrepreneurship may be considered a hypothesis. By definition, a hypothesis is a concept or ‘idea that is tested through study and experimentation’. It has also been explained as “something more than a wild guess but less than a well-established theory”; a theory being a reasonable idea or explanation that is scientifically acceptable and has been tested over a long period of time to reach a conclusion. But for an idea or concept to be scientifically acceptable, it has to be looked at and tested from many angles. Its conclusion is based on hard facts with the solid proof being given as evidence that it is true.

Currently, we have been working on taking Humane Entrepreneurship from the tiny seeds of a concept to a hypothesis that is being tested and researched, with the aim of making it a theory that is widely accepted. The challenge is taking something as intangible as a concept, something that you can’t see or touch, and being able to give it substance and measurement through words, mathematics, and formulas. But can a concept, the concept of Humane Entrepreneurship, actually be measured? Our next article will explore that question.

~
In the progress of this discussion, I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance.

Written by Dr. Ayman El Tarabishy

ICSB Executive Director
Deputy Chair, Department of Management
GW School of Business
Washington DC
aymanelt@icsb.org

JSBM SPECIAL ISSUE

JSBM SPECIAL ISSUE

JSBM SPECIAL ISSUE

Guest Editors:
Prof. Roberto Parente
University of Salerno
Prof. Ki Chan Kim
Catholic University of Korea-Seoul
Prof. Alex De Noble
San Diego State University
Prof. Jeffrey Hornsby
UMCK University

 BACKGROUND

The UN Declaration of the Micro and Small Business (MSMEs) Day, spearheaded by the International Council for Small Business (ICSB), has been a key milestone in the fulfillment of ICSB’s mission to support entrepreneurs and small business in progressing towards inclusive economic growth. The Declaration, while highlighting the complexity and the multidimensionality of the entrepreneurial role, recognizes the role of MSMEs in the achievement of the UN – Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The ICSB Forums held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, together with the organization of a large portfolio of congresses and conferences all around the world, have been valuable opportunities to connect and celebrate organizations and individuals committed to helping MSMEs move in the direction of creating more decent jobs while protecting the environment as well as their local communities. This movement fostered a new type of research activity around the concept of the Humane Approach to Entrepreneurship. In particular, thanks to the pioneering work of Prof. Ki Chan Kim and Ayman El Tarabishy, an international group of researchers was assembled to better define the concept (humaneentrepreneurship.org). This was intended as a model for firms’ growth based on entrepreneurial orientation, leadership, and fair human resource management. Furthermore, in a pair of articles published by JSBM (56-S1, 2018), the Humane Entrepreneurship concept was at first defined as a means to create both financial wealth and new high-quality jobs (Ki Chan et al, 2018), and, subsequently, as a strategic posture defined by the capability to provide leverage on Entrepreneurial Orientation, and at the same time,  on orientation towards executive and employees welfare and on orientation towards social and environmental sustainability (Parente et al. 2018, Parente et al. 2020).

Today, management and entrepreneurship research is theory-driven to a much larger extent. A major challenge for Humane Entrepreneurship research, therefore, is to prove the existence of Human Entrepreneurship Orientation (HumEnt) and define a measurement scale  for performing research with a solid theoretical grounding. This special issue is a starting point to make suggestions as to exactly how this should be done. We do note, however, that strategy research increasingly deals with dynamic issues that are largely entrepreneurial in nature. Potentially, Humane Entrepreneurship research can find its theoretical habitat within these dynamic approaches in strategy research. An added benefit of a solid theoretical grounding is that it may be easier for scholars to publish their work in the kind of high-quality journals that favor theory-driven research, including ICSB’s JSBM Journal which has also encouraged cutting edge research.

OVERVIEW

The focus on orientations is a well-grounded perspective from which to study entrepreneurship at the firm level (Miller and Friesen, 1982; Covin and Slavin, 1991; Lumpkin and Dess, 1996), and is in line with the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TBP) (Ajzen, 1991), which states that behavioral intentions guide our decision pathways.

From this point of view, Humane Entrepreneurship (HumEnt) can be viewed as a strategic posture which inspires new forms of eentrepreneurial strategies for wealth creation (Ireland and Al, 2001). This can be compared to the triple bottom line approach that argues for jointly optimizing social, environmental, and economic returns (“people, planet, profits”). The inventor of that concept, John Elkington, recently noted that scholars and managers have struggled to operationalize it productively. Interestingly, his proposed operationalization looks much like the theme of humane entrepreneurship proposed here (Kraaijenbrink, 2020 .) Another even older approach is from EF Schumacher’s classic Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered that argued that while humans enable any system, should systems also enable humans? One needs entrepreneurial thinking to make that happen. To Elkington’s point, how do we move from trade offs between his 3 Ps toward synergies?

The concept of HumEnt as a new theoretical construct has its roots in well-established fields of studies in Management and Entrepreneurship. One of the main inspirational sources can be found within Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a conceptualization that captures the idea that corporations have not only economic (and legal) obligations but some ethical and discretionary (philanthropic) responsibilities as well (Carroll, 1991). The CSR influence on the strategic entrepreneurship theory is not new at all, an example can be found in Hitt et al. (2011) where they argued that successful strategic entrepreneurial activity should create value for customers, stockholders, and other stakeholders.

From a broader perspective, the Humane Entrepreneurship concept is in line with a philosophical line of thought that argues over the influence of ethical dimensions in the emergence of orientations and behaviors of economic agents. Even if traces of this discourse can already be found in the works of enlightenment philosophers that defined the field of economy as a new scientific field in the 18th century,  more recently there has been a rising interest in the role of ethics in management. The ethics perspective has to lead to a fine-grain distinction between immoral, amoral and moral orientations in management (Carroll, 2001) while more recent work introduced the distinction between egotistic, altruistic and biospheric orientation (De Groot and Steg, 2008). On a positive side, Humanistic Management emerged as a managerial (and possibly entrepreneurial) orientation characterized by “management which emphasizes the human condition and is oriented to the development of human virtue, in all its forms, to its fullest extent” (Melé 2003).

Humane Entrepreneurship, as a strategic posture, is still in its infancy state and, similar to concepts focusing on entrepreneurship at the firm-level, needs an effort of clarification about the epistemology of firm-level orientations, real entrepreneurial events, and organizational performances, and the structure of the links between them (Kantur, 2014).

 Research Issues

Following is a non-exhaustive and non-exclusive list of issues and questions that might be addressed in response to this Call For Papers. Other appropriately related topics are equally welcome:

  • What are the internal and external factors that behave as antecedents of HumEnt orientation?
  • What effect does a firm’s nature of business (necessity or opportunity-driven), size, age, and/or industry have on HumEnt?
  • Is HumEnt different in different cultures and/or does it change according to different economic phases?
  • Is HumEnt able to create new organizational resources and dynamic capabilities?
  • HumEnt and Social Capital development at either the individual or organizational level.
  • How to measure HumEnt Orientations? Is it possible to have a unique index?
  • How HumEnt orientations influence the selection of entrepreneurial opportunity?
  • What are the links between HumEnt as a Strategic Posture and Strategic Entrepreneurship? Can a direct link or other factors mediate/moderate this relationship?
  • What are the links between HumEnt as a Strategic Posture and a firm’s performance? Is it a direct link or do other factors mediate/moderate this relationship?
  • Can HumEnt facilitate networking strategy and local development?
  • Progress on UN-Sustainable Development Goals achievements and HumEnt.

We especially seek empirical papers, both quantitative and qualitative. However, conceptual and theory-building papers are also welcomed.

New Deadline

Call Opens                                         February  2020
Call Ends                                           July 2020 – in conjunction with ICSB World Congress
First Revision                                    October 2020
Final Date of Acceptance                December 2020
Publication date                                April 2021

More Info:

Prof. Roberto Parente – University of Salerno
rparente@unisa.it

Prof. Ki Chan Kim – Catholic University of Korea – Seoul
Kckim.kckim@gmail.com

 References

Ajzen, I. (1991), “The Theory of Planned Behavior,” in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50(2), 179–211.

Carroll A. (1991), “The Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibility: Toward the Moral Management of Organizational Stakeholders”, in Business Horizons, 34(4), 39-48.

Carroll A. (2001) “Models Of Management Morality For The New Millennium”, in Business Ethics Quarterly, Apr. Vol. 11 Issue 2.

Covin J. G., Slevin D.P. (1991), “A Conceptual Model of Entrepreneurship as Firm Behavior”, in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 16(1), 7–25.

De Groot, J., & Steg, L. (2008), “Value orientations to explain beliefs related to environmental significant behavior: How to measure egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric value orientations”. In Environment and Behavior, 40(3), 330-354.

Hitt, Ireland, Sirmon, and Trahms (2011), Creating Value for Individuals, Organizations, and Society”, in Academy of Management Executive, May 2011.

Ireland, R. D., M. A. Hitt, S. M. Camp, and D. L. Sexton (2001), “Integrating Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management Actions to Create Firm Wealth,”, Academy of Management Executive 15 (1), 49–63.

Kantur D. (2014), “Strategic entrepreneurship: Mediating the entrepreneurial orientation- performance link”, in Management Decision, Vol. 54 Issue: 1

Ki Chan K., El Tarabishy A, Tae Bae Z. (2018),  “Humane entrepreneurship: How focusing on people can drive a new era of wealth and quality job creation in a sustainable world”, in JSBM, Vol. 56 n. S1, March.

Lumpkin (2001), “Linking Two Dimensions of Entrepreneurial Orientation to Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of Environment and Industry Life Cycle,” Journal of Business Venturing 16(5).

Lumpkin, G.T. and Dess, G.G. (1996), “Clarifying the entrepreneurial orientation construct and linking it to performance”, in Academy of Management Review, Vol. 21 No. 1.

Melè D. (2003), “The Challenge of Humanistic Management”, in Journal of Business Ethics 44: 77–88.


Miller, D., P. H. Friesen (1982), “Innovation in Conservative and Entrepreneurial Firms: Two Models of Strategic Momentum”, in Strategic Management Journal 3(1), 1–25.

Parente R., El Tarabishy A., Vesci M., Botti A. (2018), “The epistemology of humane entrepreneurship: Theory and proposal for future research agenda”, in JSBM, Vol. 56 n. S1, March.

Parente R., El Tarabishy A., Botti A., Vesci M., Feola R. (2020), “Humane Entrepreneurship: Some steps in the development of a measurement scale”, in JSBM Forthcoming

https://jeroenkraaijenbrink.com/2019/12/10/what-the-3ps-of-the-triple-bottom-line-really-mean/

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 1

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 1

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 1

Monday, February, 17, 2020

Humane Entrepreneurship – Thinking Paper Series Issue 1

Monday, February, 17, 2020

Is Humane Entrepreneurship the Right Entry Point to Find and Deploy Solutions to the Global Challenges Humanity Faces?

If you had the chance to decide which was the biggest challenge facing the globe, could you choose? If you were then tasked with finding a solution and acting on it, could you meet the challenge? We all know our world faces many complex issues with too few answers. Most citizens look to governments or governmental agencies to find and implement solutions. But are the vexing global issues we face things that only political entities should be looking at and acting on? What about all of us, everyday citizens who aren’t involved in making laws, policies, and widespread reforms? We at ICSB believe it comes down to the concept of Humane Entrepreneurship.

In September 2000, the United Nations issued the Millennial Declaration, from which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were articulated with the aim of halving poverty and reducing extreme poverty by 2015. As 2015 came and moved along, the UN was forced to acknowledge that though some progress was made, it was obviously short of achieving its objectives. It also became clear that governments and politicians couldn’t handle the job alone, but all actors including the private sector—and their employees who relied on the earth for life—needed to be actively working towards the same goals, rising to meet the challenge and being part of the solution.

So, in 2015, the UN and nearly all its member states expanded on the MDGs, coming up with a more ambitious set of new goals—a total of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Many of these goals require innovation, entrepreneurship, and business solutions in order to be reached. ICSB members felt that they had the right mix of approaches to answer the call. 

Created to support small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs, ICSB stands on four pillars: Education, Research, Policy, and Practice. Together, these four pillars create a formidable foundation to analyze challenges as well as devise and deploy solutions through the collective knowledge and creativity of many minds. So, when the UN’s SDGs were created, we knew we had the right basis to address them. How would we contribute to the solution? For us, it started with one element.

At ICSB, we believe that Humane Entrepreneurship is the right entry point to find and deploy solutions to the global challenges humanity faces and help reach the 2030 SDG targets. With a focus not just on business or wealth but performance and sustainability, the idea of Humane Entrepreneurship really hones in on the three dimensions of the SDGs—social, environmental, and economic. Businesses that are beneficial to humanity and respectful of earth’s precious natural resources, while being economically viable and sustainable, defines enterprises of the future. What does this concept of Humane Entrepreneurship fully entail? We’ll discuss that more in-depth in the next article in our Thinking Paper Series “Humane Entrepreneurship as a Concept.”

~
In the progress of this discussion, I shall endeavor to give a satisfactory answer to all the objections which shall have made their appearance.~
 

Written by Dr. Ayman El Tarabishy

ICSB Executive Director
Deputy Chair, Department of Management
GW School of Business
Washington DC
aymanelt@icsb.org