Introduction

The first volume of the series Advances in Entrepreneurial Processes deals with the issue of entrepreneurial processes in the era of digital transformation, which is generating profound changes in the business environment, blurring industry boundaries, and creating unprecedented threats and opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Overall, scholars contributing to this volume have addressed their attention towards three main themes, respectively, dealing with:

• digitalization of entrepreneurial processes (Part I);

• personal traits in the era of digitalization (Part II); and

• scaling and exponential growth linked to opportunities/threats of digitalization (Part III).

Let us briefly analyse the content of each chapter.

Part I comprehends four chapters. In Chapter 1, "Fostering Digital Entrepreneurship by Developing Entrepreneurial Mindset", Ehtisham Ali, Adele Parmentola, and Usman Ali remark how the digital entrepreneurial mindset is becoming increasingly important in today's rapidly changing and digitally driven world. With the proliferation of the Internet and the increasing reliance on technology in various industries, there are numerous opportunities for individuals to create value through digital means. It involves continuously seeking out and exploring new technologies and platforms as well as staying up-to-date on industry trends and consumer needs. Overall, the chapter is an attempt to provide a theoretical review of where the notion of the entrepreneurial mindset stands today, how it develops through meta-cognition, and how it may be adapted into a digital entrepreneurial mindset to foster entrepreneurship in the digital realm.

Chapter 2, "Digital Innovation and Incubation Process", is by Valentina Iscaro, Rigved Joshi, Roni Noueihed, and Sami Abu Hadir. According to the authors, in an economic and employment environment where uncertainty is the main feature, entrepreneurship has represented and continues to represent a solution adopted by several individuals and teams. However, the initial lack of managerial and entrepreneurial skills, the liabilities of newness (i.e. the new firms' lack of social relations and stable ties and the presence of underdeveloped organizational processes and routines), and of smallness (i.e. the missing of resources for small firms competing with large companies) have determined a preoccupying mortality rate of start-ups in their first 5 years. In such an environment, business incubators play a key role as they help starting ventures by providing access to several services and resources not necessarily owned, often outside their value chain.

Chapter 3, "Digital Sustainable Entrepreneurship Business Model and Its Contribution to Sustainable Development Goals" by Surabhi Singh, Urvashi Makkar, and Djamchid Assadi, explores how the firms are obliged to reduce their negative environmental impact by implementing digital sustainable entrepreneurship model innovation. The chapter takes an entrepreneurship and digital perspective on sustainable business model innovation and combines literature of business models and experimental models. The results have theoretical implications for the intersection of sustainability and lean approaches in innovation research as well as implications for practitioners by providing a comprehensive framework to support sustainable business model innovation. In the end, the chapter presents a business model perspective on digital sustainable entrepreneurship that hugely contributes to sustainable development goals.

In Chapter 4, "Digital Technologies in Entrepreneurship and Shifting of Entrepreneurial Trajectories", Tamim Mahamud Foisal, Ashraful Alam, and Thasinul Abedin argue that the domain of digital technology has shaped the dimensions of entrepreneurship, including entrepreneurial opportunities, business models, as well as the performance of entrepreneurial firms that opt for the demand of looking for a new window of entrepreneurship usually referred to as "digital entrepreneurship". In this backdrop, this chapter looks for how digital technologies affect entrepreneurship as well as the trajectories and changes in those trajectories of newly digitalized entrepreneurial firms. In this respect, this chapter utilizes a theoretical underpinning to explore the fundamental concepts of digital entrepreneurship and how these relate to different aspects of entrepreneurial trajectories, specifically the opportunities, the business model, and the performance.

Part II - focused on the personal traits in the era of digitalization - includes four chapters. Chapter 5, "Entrepreneurial Orientation: An Assessment of Empirical Evidences from Italy and Some Hints for Further Research" by Mariangela Vecchiarini, Laura Castaldi, Domenico Ferrara, and Diego Matricano, contributes to ever-evolving international debate about Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) by analysing Italian Law no. 221/2012 disciplining innovative start-ups. According to this law, firms need to meet at least one of these three criteria in order to be classified as innovative start-ups: (1) expenses in R&D and innovation are required to be at least 15% of their annual costs or turnover; (2) some of the employees are required to be highly qualified personnel; (3) ventures are required to be the owner, depositary, or licensee of a registered patent or software. By an attentive reading and a careful analysis, some Italian analysts and practitioners agree on the idea that the above criteria correspond to the three dimensions of EO: risk-taking, proactiveness, and innovativeness. Based on binomial logistic regression models (14,264 observations), this chapter strives to rebuild the state of the art of EO among innovative start-ups in Italy and, by leveraging mixed-method research designs, to suggest some hints for future research.

Chapter 6, "Gender Contribution to the Competitiveness of Social Media Entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia: Context of the National Transformation" by Bassem M. Nasri, Pablo Collazzo Yelpo, and Ala'a H. Al-Hashim, addresses the questions of "how gender impacts the competitiveness of social media entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia, and how the national transformation plan to a diversified economy less dependent on oil might have influenced their level of competitiveness". Gender gap in entrepreneurship and the difference in competitiveness between men and women are covered in literature. Most of this literature addresses entrepreneurship in general and overlooks the possible contribution of starting these businesses through online social media platforms, especially in the context of the Middle East, and in Saudi Arabia in particular, which witnessed major changes at multiple levels since the year 2016. This research tries to mind this gap and follows an exploratory qualitative case study methodology to examine how these changes might have influenced the level of competitiveness in female entrepreneurs who founded social media businesses in Saudi Arabia. The conservative nature of the Saudi society, insufficient support by each of the family, the society, and the government were found to have contributed to the success of social media businesses owned by females in Saudi Arabia. The introduction of the Vision 2030, and the set of reforms and social changes associated with the National Transformation Plan, revealed a high level of competitiveness and entrepreneurial readiness in female Instagram entrepreneurs. The research has implications for theory, private sector, and policy makers and suggests giving the subject more attention in future research.

In Chapter 7, "How to Locate Resources in the Personal Networks Along the Entrepreneurial Processes? Following-Up of a Nascent Digital Nomad Entrepreneur", Rym Ibrahim and Claire Bidart start with the assumption that transition to entrepreneurship is a complex process and so its study requires innovative adapted methods. The social sciences can help shed light on this process, taking into account, in particular, the social and technological contexts that are involved in these trajectories. To specifically address this objective, they propose to focus on the roles that personal networks of the entrepreneurs, combined with digital tools, play in accessing resources. The digital transformation of communication media tends to shorten the paths of access to information and to opportunities, but the uses of these tools are often embedded in relational resources. In particular, the scholars propose a precise scientific method to better understand the emergence of resources from personal networks along the entrepreneurial processes. This method is particularly powerful for considering relationship-based strategies for finding resources and opportunities, including when relationships are distributed across multiple geographical locations or are digitally mediated. Indeed, they consider that rather than being an alternative, technological resources are articulated in continuity with relational resources. Thus, they intend to contribute to the body of work that focuses on the dynamics of entrepreneurial networks and on entrepreneurship as...