Open Access

Wer Organisationen als (hierarchische) Netzwerke von Holons und Monaden betrachtet, eröffnet sich Einsichten über Dynamik und Stabilität von Kommunikation und Entscheidung entlang der arbeitsteiligen Leistungserstellung.

Our study replicates a US study and an Australian study in the Italian context to address whether the home-country context influences the nature of dynamic capabilities (DCs) that are developed and deployed in small, entrepreneurial firms for these firms to internationalize. We measure a suite of dynamic capabilities and relate these to innovation in the firm which is put to internationalization. The Italian findings portray two logics, a dominant entrepreneur’s logic and a lesser significant entrepreneurial logic. The entrepreneur’s logic is centered on the entrepreneur and their vision and is dominant in the Italian model. The entrepreneurial logic, based on the bundling of DCs to learn from internal and external environments, is represented in all three countries. Our three country comparison illustrates that dynamic capability development and deployment is indeed contextdependent. Notwithstanding contextual differences across Italian and Anglo-Saxon countries, which present spatial boundary conditions, the theoretical configuration of DCs, innovation and internationalization we replicated is retained, suggesting that it has potential to be developed further into an actionable theory of DCs for the small, entrepreneurial firm that internationalizes.

The role of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs in the current zeitgeist is to drive innovation, re-shape rigid, established processes in business as well as for consumers. They use new viewpoints to pioneer new (business) models which focus on ‘smartness’ rather than the purely monetary and short-sighted models of yesteryear. Fostering and supporting the culture of this current zeitgeist is a mayor challenge for entre- and intrapreneurial support infrastructures, namely startup centres and innovation hubs of universities and other public institutions as well as innovation centres of private companies. Hereby, support may range from access to funding over provision of resources such as offices or computing hardware to coaching in the development of business ideas and strategic roadmaps for product and service deployment. In this paper, we focus on describing the status-quo of afore- mentioned support infrastructures in Vorarlberg and the Lake Constance region, then extend the scope to existing (international) approaches for aiding founders and inno- vators in the development of smart services. An analysis of success stories of the Vorarlberg startup centre ‘startupstube’ and other initiatives including their compar- ison to international counterparts builds the basis for a methodological framework for (service science) coaching in entre- and intrapreneurial support infrastructures. The paper is concluded by the description of a framework for choosing the right methods and tools to create service value in entre-/intrapreneurship based upon tested, proven know-how and for defining support infrastructure needs based upon pre-defined stakeholder and target groups as well as the (industry) sectors of the innovators.