Digital Entrepreneurship: Public Perception of Barriers, Drivers, and Future

Isabelle Biclesanu,Marco Savastano,Sorin Anagnoste,Ovidiu Branga

doi:10.3390/admsci11040125

Isabelle Biclesanu, Marco Savastano + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci11040125

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Abstract

The widespread access to the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way businesses handle their processes and interact with their customers. With the surge of new devices, business models, technologies, and platforms, alongside social media growth and innovative advertising, it became easier to transition from employment to entrepreneurship. The paper aims to assess the public perception of digital entrepreneurship, with a focus on its barriers, drivers, and expectations for the future. The results show that there is a slight agreement with a digital business being easier to establish compared with a traditional one. The driving forces behind starting a digital business are recognized, and the digital environment is considered essential for business growth in the following years. With some exceptions, there are no significant differences between age groups, genders, relationship statuses, levels of education, and/or occupations when rating the barriers, drivers, and expectations for the future of digital entrepreneurship.

Highlights

The widespread access to the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way in which businesses handle their processes and interact with their customers.While entrepreneurship has been around for thousands of years, the concept of digital entrepreneurship has only recently been introduced to the business landscape
As the digital environment’s attractiveness has increased because of the pandemic, this paper aims to assess the current public perception of digital entrepreneurship, with a focus on its barriers, drivers, and expectations for the future
The BARRIER variable mean was not statistically different than the neutral point, t(9) = 1.906, p = 0.09, showing that entrepreneurs might not consider the barriers for digital businesses as being lower compared with the ones for traditional businesses

Summary

Introduction

The widespread access to the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way in which businesses handle their processes and interact with their customers.While entrepreneurship has been around for thousands of years, the concept of digital entrepreneurship has only recently been introduced to the business landscape. The widespread access to the Internet has undoubtedly changed the way in which businesses handle their processes and interact with their customers. In the early days of the Internet, digital entrepreneurship implied transforming an existing business venture to accommodate the online environment, usually by building a website (McCullough 2018). Digital entrepreneurship incorporates businesses whose main activities are made possible through the use of digital technologies (Allen 2019). Digital entrepreneurship could be defined as the process of creating and pursuing entrepreneurship opportunities through the use of information and communication technology (ICT) (Antonizzi and Smuts 2020; Sussan and Acs 2017) and seen as “the reconciliation of traditional entrepreneurship with the new way of creating and doing business in the digital era” Digital entrepreneurship could be defined as the process of creating and pursuing entrepreneurship opportunities through the use of information and communication technology (ICT) (Antonizzi and Smuts 2020; Sussan and Acs 2017) and seen as “the reconciliation of traditional entrepreneurship with the new way of creating and doing business in the digital era” (Le Dinh et al 2018, p. 1)

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