Far-reaching technological developments are making a deep impact on societies and economic environments worldwide. With the emergence of new digital infrastructures such as artificial intelligence, fintech, data analytics, robotics and nanotech, new creative industries, still in a state of flux, have arisen, while others have disappeared, at least in their traditional form. The intermixing of traditional and new technologies has led to a redrawing of boundaries and an extension of the limits of entrepreneurship out towards industries with hitherto high barriers to entry due to regulatory, technological or structural factors.
These "external enablers" have led to a democratization of entrepreneurship and a lessening of the obstacles to starting up a company by reducing (or eliminating) the difficulties inherent in the entrepreneurial phenomenon in its "classical" configuration, such as high resource intensity, uncertainty, limited time or information asymmetry. The De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Entrepreneurship examines the impact of these technological disruptions not only using the existing paradigms, but also by re-examining our very conception of the entrepreneurial phenomenon in terms of its evolving nature and shifting contours.
The contributions to this handbook promote the emergence of new theories and conceptions of the entrepreneurial opportunity and process that more fully reflect the realities of the new environment we are living in. They will benefit both academics aiming to familiarize themselves with the state of research and theory within topics and subtopics in digital entrepreneurship, as well as practicing entrepreneurs and managers aiming to acquaint themselves with leading edge practices and insights in digital entrepreneurship.