Editors: Professor Gideon Maas; Professor Andrew Johnston
Entrepreneurship has always had the power to facilitate change in society. The invention of many goods, services and technologies has enabled human life to evolve at an ever-increasing rate. Therefore, within this fast-changing environment, there exist both social and economic aspects to these changes as new good, services, and technologies enable changes in the economy and society. As such, transformational entrepreneurship, promoting enterprise through a systemic approach thereby encouraging both social and economic development, has the potential to change economies through improvements to both society and the economy (Maas and Jones, 2019).
Transformational entrepreneurship is a relatively new concept that has emerged due to the need to achieve effective and efficient entrepreneurial behaviours that address global challenges that underpin economic underperformance and societal evolution (Jones and Maas, 2019). The extant literature provides several definitions of entrepreneurship that shows its transformational properties. Miller and Collier (2010) define transformational entrepreneurship “as the creation of an innovative virtue-based organization for the purpose of shifting resources out of lower and into higher purpose activities and greater value to transcend economic terms and emphasize the centrality and value of people, their vocations, and the many levels of relationality involved in entrepreneurship, in addition to the technical aspects of the business”. Therefore, transformational entrepreneurship can reconcile economic and social disparities in society (Newey, 2017).
Jones and Maas (2019) emphasise the ‘systemic’ element of transformational entrepreneurship, necessary for its operationalisation and function in order to translate the development of new products, services, technologies, and processes into socio-economic development. This systemic view contends that entrepreneurs do not act alone; instead, entrepreneurial outcomes result from the interaction of entrepreneurs with other actors and organisations. Therefore, context, location, and ecosystems all play a role in this process.
However, the potential for socio-economic value creation through entrepreneurship is under-explored (Ratten and Jones, 2018). Consequently, within the systemic and transformational entrepreneurship domains, the focus is on researching and finding improved ways to address current global realities and to create a holistic and heuristic approach, which can form a sound basis for socio-economic growth in the future. Therefore, creating entrepreneurial aspirations among people through learning and applying new knowledge is essential for promoting growth, especially in a challenging global environment.
Transformational entrepreneurship also offers an interesting insight into how changes occur. Firstly, it is conceptually broad, encompassing the elements of leadership, learning, and innovation. Consequently, each factor can influence the process and play a different role in promoting change. Furthermore, behaviours associated with transformational entrepreneurship may focus on enabling change personally, facilitating advances on knowledge and expertise to promote change, or recognizing opportunities for new products, services, and processes to support change. Secondly, the scope of transformational entrepreneurship is worldwide; the socio-economic changes these activities can promote are equally relevant to the niche sectors of advanced economies as well as basic sectors of emerging economies. Furthermore, these changes may be observed within differing organisational contexts, i.e. firms, the public sector, and the third sector, and at different geographic levels, i.e. cities, regions, and countries.
Given the potential of transformational entrepreneurship to effect change, this book will focus on developing theoretical and practical cases which illustrate how transformational entrepreneurship can be achieved. Authors are invited to contribute case studies on how transformational entrepreneurship has been implemented successfully at the individual, organisational, regional, or national level. We therefore invite contributions from scholars in the field that examine transformational entrepreneurship across a variety of contexts.
Chapters are welcome across, but not limited to, the following areas:
- Effecting change through entrepreneurial learning and leadership
- Socio-economic transformation through entrepreneurial learning
- Gender and transformational entrepreneurship
- Student/graduate transformational entrepreneurship
- Entrepreneurial universities
We want to publish 25 cases from around the world. In the first instance, authors should submit a 250-word abstract to the editors that outlines the aims and contribution of the chapter. Accepted chapters will then be subject to peer-review. Cases should be circa 5000 words each. Teaching notes should also be provided per case.
The proposed publication timetable is as follows:
1st November 2022 – call for chapters released
15th December 2022 – deadline for submission of abstract
15th January 2023 – notification of acceptance
30th March 2023 – submission of full chapter
30th June 2023 – submission of revised chapters
31st July 2023 – submission of manuscript
31st October 2023 – publication of volume
Please send your proposals to:
Prof Gideon Maas, Executive Director, International Centre for Transformational Entrepreneurship, Coventry University, UK.
Prof Andrew Johnston, Director Research, International Centre for Transformational Entrepreneurship, Coventry University, UK.
