Recent Issues on Transnational Entrepreneurship

The following research papers have been developed with advanced students in a research seminar in 2017 at University of Bremen, Germany. The student teams developed condensed project reports of their research activities that transformed in the papers following up this editorial. One by one, the papers to some extent tie in the above-mentioned three sets of questions and provide first answers.

Mane Narimanyan and Tatevik Narimanyan address the motivational foundations of becoming a diaspora entrepreneur. A core ambition of the paper is to connect findings that, to date, relate predominantly to particular types of diaspora entrepreneurship. For an overview and a categorization, the paper identifies four different types of diaspora entrepreneurs. Another issue of the paper is the attempt to depart from a solely qualitative view on motivation and to take quantitative measurement aspects into account. In this vein, numeric relations between motivational factors were introduced.

Nicoletta Capriuolo, Alessandro Cuman, Ambra Evandri, Federico Gianni and Arianna Saturni research on entrepreneurship in ethnic enclaves. Based on a literature-based content analysis, the authors develop a framework of determinants of self-employment and a model identifying performance indicators of ethnic ventures. The paper challenges traditional views od ethnic enclaves by shedding light on more recent settings with ethnic enclaves as a cohesive social body beyond solely geographical aspects.

Lisa Ahuis, Myra Louise Grewe, Franziska Otten and Helena Rolf both summarize and analyze the state of the art in returnee entrepreneurship. As the field of returnee entrepreneurship is wide open, the authors frame their consideration by dwelling on the following research questions: which aspects of returnee entrepreneurship have been studied so far and why? Moreover, they ask about the gaps of previous research. For a first access to available research results, the authors focus their paper on a limited set of criteria to locate the nature of literature contributions. This set considers discipline, methodology, country of origin and industry background of the relevant articles and provides readers with a first orientation as to this interesting and developing field of research.