Product Innovation and Personalization via Social Media

Innovation of products continually, customization, and personalization are the strategies to gain sustainable competitive advantage for companies operating in Industry 4.0 era. Corporations tend to turn to the new social media for access to customer data. How much big data in terms of variety, veracity, velocity, and volume the corporation has determines its prediction architecture and hence customer satisfaction. This is reflected both in terms of inflecting revenues as well as investment from the venture capitalists (VCs), who then see great potential in the business, whether it be a start-up, an established organization, or its spin-off. This chapter explains this new management strategy for corporate sustainability through application of social media to acquire personal consumer and customer data. This is to devise customised products, personalize experience, and innovate for the two. The chapter takes exceptional growth story of BYJU's an educational technology company, as an example to elucidate the theory, concepts, and ideas discussed.

How time-inconsistent preferences influence venture capital exit decisions? A new perspective for grandstanding

Considering that the assumption of time consistency does not adequately reveal the mechanisms of exit decisions of venture capital (VC), this study proposes two kinds of time-inconsistent preferences (i.e., time-flow inconsistency and time-point inconsistency) to advance research in this field. Time-flow inconsistency is in line with the previous time inconsistency literature, while time-point inconsistency is rooted in the VC fund’s finite lifespan. Based on the assumption about the strategies guiding future behaviors, we consider four types of venture capitalists: time-consistent, time-point-inconsistent, naïve, and sophisticated venture capitalists, of which the latter three are time-inconsistent. We derive and compare the exit thresholds of these four types of venture capitalists. The main results include: (1) time-inconsistent preferences accelerate the exits of venture capitalists; (2) the closer the VC funds expiry dates are, the more likely time-inconsistent venture capitalists are to accelerate their exits; and (3) future selves caused by time-flow inconsistency weaken the effect of time-point inconsistency. Our study provides a behavioral explanation for the empirical fact of young VCs’ grandstanding.

Commitment to capital raising for venture capital funds in India: An Application of ARDL Model

Venture capitalists (VCs) áourish on the ability to add funds to their kitty across nations. Consequently, VCsíability to convince Limited Partners (LP), who are their primary source of Önancing, plays a critical role in the venture capital investment growth in any economy. However, it is not easy to rake in capital from an investor. LPs assess the market conditions carefully before making their capital available to the VCs. This paper examines the macro-economic variables that ináuence the supply of money to venture capital funds in emerging economies such as India from an LPs perspective. The empirical analysis using Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach reveals that supply of capital to the VC funds in India is ináuenced by macro variables as well as past investment behaviours. Macro-variables such as GDP growth, interest rate spread, global liquidity, and ináation rate signiÖcantly ináuence the supply of capital to the VC funds in India. However, stock market liquidity does not ináuence the supply side of the venture capital investment. Our analysis reveals that VCsífund raising in India is highly ináuenced by their past investment relation with the LPs.

Readiness Assessment for IDE Startups: A Pathway toward Sustainable Growth

Innovation-driven enterprises (IDEs) steer their businesses with ideas, technology, and innovation. However, many of them have limited resources, capabilities, and readiness to turn their valuable creativity into marketable products. For IDE startups to survive and achieve sustainable growth, they must seek financial and other, non-pecuniary support from governmental agencies and large corporate venture capitalists. Usually, governments and large firms need to determine the readiness level (RL) of IDE startups, in order to set up proper strategies for resource allocation, resource prioritization, and collaborative R&D to support startups. In addition, IDE startups themselves also need to perform self-assessment of their readiness level to identify rooms for improvement. This research addresses the significance of IDE readiness assessment. An assessment framework, connecting four dimensions, specifically technology, manufacturing, business, and commerce, is proposed, and three case examples are presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed framework.

Is there a gender gap in equity-based crowdfunding?

Compared to their male peers, female entrepreneurs tend to face greater obstacles in raising venture funding from business angels, venture capitalists, and financial institutions. In this paper, we investigate whether this gender gap also exists in equity crowdfunding. Based on data from the German equity crowdfunding market, we find that ventures with and without female managing directors are equally successful in raising capital when launching their first equity crowdfunding campaign. In contrast, the former are significantly less successful than their peers in seasoned equity crowdfunding campaigns, and this disparity cannot be fully explained by differences in other venture-related or entrepreneur-related characteristics. However, we also find that the gender gap in seasoned offerings narrows if female entrepreneurs set more ambitious funding thresholds. Overall, our results indicate that pitching their equity crowdfunding campaigns in a more promotion-oriented way is a sensible strategy for female entrepreneurs to improve funding success.

Entrepreneurial Passion and Venture Capitalists’ Willingness to Invest: The Role of Relational Capital

Venture capital investment has serious conflicts of interest and information asymmetry. Venture capitalists often make investment decisions on the basis of the passion of entrepreneurs, including enthusiasm and preparedness, in the process of interacting with them. Most of the previous research on relational capital have focused on the cooperative relationship between suppliers and buyers. However, the role of relational capital in the process of partnership between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs has not been revealed. On the basis of signaling theory, we explore the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and venture capitalists’ willingness to invest. We also examine the mediating and moderating roles of relational capital. This study takes 79 projects between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs as samples for empirical analysis to verify our hypothesis. Results show that entrepreneurs’ enthusiasm and preparedness have a significant positive impact on venture capitalists’ willingness to invest. Relational capital plays a mediating role between entrepreneurial passion and venture capitalists’ willingness to invest. Relational capital positively moderates the relationship between preparedness and venture capitalists’ willingness to invest but has no moderating effect between enthusiasm and venture capitalists’ willingness to invest. Results deepen the understanding of the relationship between entrepreneurs’ passion and venture capitalists’ willingness to invest, which has guiding significance for venture capital practice in China.

Artificial intelligence (AI) for tourism: an European-based study on successful AI tourism start-ups

Purpose The travel and tourism industry (TTI) could benefit the most from artificial intelligence (AI), which could reshape this industry. This study aims to explore the characteristics of tourism AI start-ups, the AI technological domains financed by Venture Capitalists (VCs), and the phases of the supply chain where the AI domains are in high demand. Design/methodology/approach This study developed a database of the European AI start-ups operating in the TTI from the Crunchbase database (2005–2020). The authors used start-ups as the unit of analysis as they often foster radical change. The authors complemented quantitative and qualitative methods. Findings AI start-ups have been mainly created by male Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics graduates between 2015 and 2017. The number of founders and previous study experience in non-start-up companies was positively related to securing a higher amount of funding. European AI start-ups are concentrated in the capital town of major tourism destinations (France, UK and Spain). The AI technological domains that received more funding from VCs were Learning, Communication and Services (i.e. big data, machine learning and natural language processing), indicating a strong interest in AI solutions enabling marketing automation, segmentation and customisation. Furthermore, VC-backed AI solutions focus on the pre-trip and post-trip. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study focussing on digital entrepreneurship, specifically VC-backed AI start-ups operating in the TTI. The authors apply, for the first time, a mixed-method approach in the study of tourism entrepreneurship.