Small Business

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the extant body of literature on artisan entrepreneurship and to develop a research agenda for future studies based on the identified trends and themes.
Design/methodology/approach – A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was undertaken across 96 journals ranked by the Association of Business Schools. The initial search yielded 86 papers. Further scrutiny of these studies led to the development of exclusion criteria, resulting in a refined list of 32 articles which advance understanding of artisan entrepreneurship. Using an open coding approach, this SLR then identified seven core themes and 16 sub-themes which the extant literature examines.
Findings – This SLR finds that artisan entrepreneurship research contributes to understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour, context, motivation, development, resources, diversity and classification. It provides timely insights into coopetition practices, the reciprocal relationship between place and entrepreneurship and the coexistence of social and economic goals. It also reveals characteristics which facilitate venture development, discovers the mutability of various forms of capital, highlights the necessity of studying diverse experiences and identifies benefits and limits of typologies. Main elements of the resulting research agenda include calls for more quantitative research, further attention to context and more holistic treatment of a wider variety of stories.
Originality/value – This paper presents the first systematic literature review of craft and artisan entrepreneurship research. It not only identifies, analyses and critiques the main streams in the literature, therefore providing an overview of the state of the field, but also highlights areas where this scholarship contributes to understanding of entrepreneurship and upon which future research can build. Artisan entrepreneurship is thus established as worthy of investigation in its own right and as an appropriate context in which to explore entrepreneurial processes. Furthermore, this SLR presents an agenda for future research to advance understanding of artisan entrepreneurship.

The spread of COVID-19 resulted in the closing of all non-essential organizations. One of the hardest hit sectors was the collocated live experience economy. Collocated live experiences are those sectors where a minimum of 50% of products or services revenue is dependent on both the live experience producer and their customers being collocated in the same physical space. The collocated live experience economy incorporates nine sectors, including organized sport, active recreation, arts and culture, food services, retail and personal care services. In pre-COVID-19 Calgary, this included almost 15,000 organizations employing 152,000 people.

The consequences of COVID-19 mitigation measures have been not only the forced closure of many collocated live experiences, but also the explosion of innovations, as organizations sought to engage their customers through alternative means. At a global level, examples of innovations include Michelin Star restaurants offering food delivery, museums providing robotic tours, NASCAR hosting virtual races with their drivers, and musicians live streaming concerts.

There remains a fundamental question of whether entire sectors of our city have pathways to sustainability. The many innovations sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic also triggered a strategic reorientation for these organizations. Those who can develop innovations that are authentic and still generate revenue may then be in a position to further leverage these innovations for sustained growth. The discussion paper considers three questions:
1) Can innovative business models developed, tested, and implemented during the pandemic trigger a structural change in live experiences?
2) Will these innovations offer comparative, superior, or inferior value to customers?
3) Can a more stable and sustained live experience business model be developed?

In this paper, we examine the factors that influence a customer’s decision to adopt or reject innovations in live experiences and the impact this will have on the financial sustainability of specific sectors. No LX producer could have prepared for the unprecedented impact of a global pandemic. Nor could they have anticipated the devastation that COVID-19 would have on the CLX industry. However, these same entrepreneurs and small business owners do control the decisions that will influence their future. To support these organizations, we provide a diagnostic framework for live experience organizations to evaluate their future. Finally, we use this framework to map a series of potential innovation pathways for diverse sub-sectors of the live experience economy, from film festivals, to fitness centres, to restaurants and retail.

Purpose of this study is to highlight some of entrepreneur's and sme's characteristics that are sources of competitive advantage. Further, the sources of competitive advantage drive to it. Thus, via the obtainment and maintenance of a diachronically long-term competitive advantage, a small business can achieve the principal objective of a firm which is maximization of its wealth and continuous stay on profit areas. Plethora of resources and competences were proposed as sources of competitive advantage in resource-based view and add continually new ones. It appears to suffer hierarchy of sources of competitive advantage regarding sustainability of these. Literature about sme and entrepreneur emphasizes the significant role of certain factors such as business size, management, ownership, data relating to the survival and competitiveness of sme, sales, profitability, liquidity, lack of skilled personnel, distribution channels data and market information, potential fundraising, use of innovation or new technologies, organizational structure, resources control, networking and clustering. Between factors that make up features of a successful small business are these influencing business size of sme, such as characteristics of entrepreneur, management strategies, external environment's influence, and sme's characteristics. Little difference exists between sme's failure and success. Apart from environmental factors, there are three categories of failures mentioned: functional knowledge, managerial skills and managerial behaviour, related to entrepreneur's and sme's characteristics.