How can entrepreneurs protect their wellbeing during a crisis? Does engaging agility (namely, opportunity agility and planning agility) in response to adversity help entrepreneurs safeguard their wellbeing? Activated by adversity, agility may function as a specific resilience mechanism enabling positive adaption to crisis. We studied 3162 entrepreneurs from 20 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that more severe national lockdowns enhanced firm-level adversity for entrepreneurs and diminished their wellbeing. Moreover, entrepreneurs who combined opportunity agility with planning agility experienced higher wellbeing but planning agility alone lowered wellbeing. Entrepreneur agility offers a new agentic perspective to research on entrepreneur wellbeing.

Improvisation might be seen as a method of responsible innovation in organizations, due to its potential to be more responsive and enable bottom-up initiative. Considering that improvising involves the ability to pivot we argue that enhancing entrepreneurial orientation of existing firms means that their entrepreneurial behaviors can be also displayed in more responsible manner. The paper aims at investigating the influence of improvisation on entrepreneurial orientation (EO). While intuitively improvisation is closely connected to EO, surprisingly, there is very little theoretical and empirical evidence on that relation. The paper closes that gap by empirically investigating the role that improvisation plays in enhancing EO. Building on empirical evidence on the role of improvising in individual entrepreneurship, we use Hmieleski and Corbett’s framework of improvisation as a three-dimensional construct (creativity and bricolage, ability to function and excel under pressure and in stress-filled environments, and spontaneity and persistence) and entrepreneurial orientation as a three-dimensional construct (innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk taking) to investigate the impact of improvisation on individual components of EO. Using the data from 567 senior managers from medium and large organizations we find that improvisation has moderate effect on entrepreneurial orientation. Importantly, different dimensions of improvisation shape components of EO in different way: Creativity and bricolage have positive impact on innovativeness and proactiveness and ability to function and excel under stress has impact on propensity to take risk. The study has implications for the theory of responsible innovation by highlighting the potential of improvising to generate more responsive and stakeholder-involving and, in consequence, more responsible innovation.

The main purpose of this paper is to assess the possible impact of new technology-based firms on the social and economic development of Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries by analyzing the share of such firms among entrepreneurs and society and by investigating data on their expected growth, innovativeness, and internationalization. The study contributes to forecasting the future effects caused by NTBFs on the economy of CEE and CIS countries. We use pooled samples from 2013–2015 from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for: Russia (pooled sample size: 4,030), Hungary (6,003), Romania (6,024), Poland (6,001), Lithuania (4,000), Latvia (4,004), Estonia (6,662), Czech Republic (5,009), Slovakia (6,010), and Kazakhstan (4,205). Most analyses are based on a one-way ANOVA analysis of the differences of in the average size of country indicators for the analyzed countries.The research results point to significant differences among the analyzed countries. The share of NTBF owners ranges from 0.7% (Russia) to almost 5% (Slovakia, Romania, and Kazakhstan). NTBFs also substantially differ across countries in terms of projected growth (highest in Hungary and lowest in Russia), internationalization (highest in Latvia, lowest in Russia) and innovativeness (highest in Poland, lowest in Kazakhstan). The main limitations of this study are as follows. The sample used was not chosen specifically for the task. Moreover, the assessment of the novelty of the technology is based on entrepreneur’s self-assessment, so we might expect a bias in that regard. The data on projected growth, internationalization and innovations are just the expectations of the entrepreneurs themselves, so again, bias is expected. The relationships presented in the paper might be strongly influenced by external factors and sample pooling might even magnify that impact. The paper has implications for the policies developed to support entrepreneurship in order to facilitate growth, internationalization, and innovativeness at NTBFs.