Digital entrepreneurship

The rapid proliferation of digital technologies with new functionalities has profoundly changed competitive environments, reshaping traditional business strategies and processes (Bharadwaj, Sawy, Pavlou, & Venkatraman, 2013). Such technologies also give rise to new ways of collaboration, leveraging resources, product/service design, development, and deployment over open standards and shared technologies (Markus & Loebecke, 2013). At the microlevel, digital technologies also reshaped the mentality of entrepreneurs (Domenico, Daniel, & Nunan, 2014) and hence affect their decision‐making processes (Shepherd, Williams, & Patzelt, 2014). Digital entrepreneurship includes ventures and transformation of existing businesses by creating novel digital technologies and/or novel usage of such technologies. Currently, many countries consider digital entrepreneurship as a critical pillar for digital economic development. It is imperative to develop a fine‐grained understanding of digital entrepreneurship. Traditionally, research on entrepreneurship seeks to understand “how, by whom, and with what effects opportunities to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and exploited” (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) and how entrepreneurial activities, processes, and outcomes are influenced by certain contexts (Zahra, Wright, & Abdelgawad, 2014). Despite the increasing numbers of entrepreneurs and businesses that are currently using digital technologies to pursue opportunities, research has lagged far behind practice and paid limited attention to the phenomenon (Grégoire & Shepherd, 2012). Particularly, the understanding about the role that digital technologies play in entrepreneurship and the role that users and agents play in digital entrepreneurship remains limited (Nambisan, 2016). Several review articles on entrepreneurship also clearly point out the gaps in understanding the novel usage of digital technologies by entrepreneurs (Kiss, Danis, & Cavusgil, 2012; Mainela, Puhakka, & Servais, 2014; Shepherd et al., 2014). Research in the IS field has a relatively long tradition of investigating entrepreneurial actions enabled by digital technologies within an organizational context (Bharadwaj et al., 2013; Sambamurthy, Bharadwaj, & Grover, 2003). However, only a few recent studies have shed light on the characteristics and design of digital platforms for entrepreneurial activities, such as crowdfunding (Burtch, 2013; Burtch, 2014; Zheng, Li, Wu, & Xu, 2014). The objective of this special issue is to provide a forum for IS and other business scholars to engage in this important dialogue on digital entrepreneurship and to contribute to the development of cumulative knowledge in this pivotal area. The selected articles address digital entrepreneurship from quite diversified perspectives with different methodologies and shed light on the roles of technologies. In particular, these studies reveal some interesting interactions among platforms, players, institutions, and agency and offer rich insights to guide future research on digital entrepreneurship. The study on “Digital Transformation by SME Entrepreneurs: A Capability Perspective” by Li, Su, Zhang, and Mao (2018) offers a special perspective to understand the transformation of SMEs in a digital ecosystem. This paper presents case studies that describe how seven SMEs have transformed from local, incapable small firms to active and successful cross‐border e‐commerce (CBEC) players on the Alibaba platform. From the authors' view, these Chinese firms were “least likely to embrace IT and complex digital platforms for foreign trade.” The miracle happened through dynamic managerial capability building, organization capability building for CBEC, and strategic changes. A key perspective to appreciate the paper is its exposition on how SMEs acquire capabilities through the Alibaba digital platform. While the authors rightfully focus on SMEs' acquisition of capabilities necessary for CBEC and beyond, a