This paper aims at identifying the entrepreneurial opportunities for establishing innovative startups during and post COVID-19 crisis. To reach this goal, we conducted an exploratory study based on semi-structured interviews with 168 students who intend to involve themselves in entrepreneurship in their future career. The research started from the debates in literature regarding the huge negative impact of the COVID-19 crisis on economic development, which can jeopardize the achievement of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The research findings confirm the results of other studies regarding the vulnerability of startups during crises, the reason why they have to refocus on innovative businesses, especially based on information and communication technology (ICT). Such businesses are considered incentives of sustainable development. Other ideas highlighted the importance of social entrepreneurship for the management of startups. It means that startups should develop strong relationships with employees but also with other stakeholders, like companies in the same industry, the public sector, academia, and citizens. In addition, changing the business culture aiming at developing green business could be an inexpensive solution for developing a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem. These empirical results have implications for both business and the academic environment, which should cooperate in order to overcome the crisis. Such an approach could be used in the long run in order to manage other crises and to develop sustainable business.

The article focuses on the creation and the development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem around the innovation clusters. Clusters are believed to have a well-defined strategic approach aimed at boosting businesses’ sustainable development, especially if clusters are centred around small and middle-sized enterprises. Having undertaken a piece of phenomenological qualitative research, we found that large companies were more open to cooperation and sustainability than the small and middle-sized ones, thus initiating and developing innovation clusters around them (particularly in high-technologized industries such as the automotive and Information Technology). Additionally, we highlight that a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem is based on strong pillars, of which small companies’ capabilities, including the entrepreneurial ones, are innovation-driven, and place them in the centre of the innovation cluster. This piece of research also provides relevant insights for private and public organisations and policymakers in order to co-create a local innovation and entrepreneurship strategy. Our findings have implications for both cluster literature and the field of entrepreneurship.

The aims of this study are to identify large companies’ role in stimulating local entrepreneurship, and higher education institutions’ contribution of fostering entrepreneurial activity in order to achieve an innovative ecosystem and turning Brasov into a startup city. To address the research questions, exploratory research was conducted among 18 representatives of companies and public institutions active in Brasov city, Romania. The findings confirm that large companies engage startups by collaborative models being also available to outsource a series of activities to entrust the startups with. These collaborations bring many opportunities to startups to scale up faster by using large companies’ resources and the routes to the markets on which they operate. Furthermore, this research reveals the need for a better synergy between education, research, and practice and, consequently, an improvement of the academic curriculum. It also exemplifies the need for joined theory and practice to influence policymakers in developing policies to create a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem. The empirical results have implications for both the entrepreneurship literature and entrepreneurship policies.

The digital environment and the businesses can no longer exist separately; the way in which entrepreneurs adapt to digital environments determines the future of the companies. By aiming to understand Romanian entrepreneurs’ openness and the assets disposed for digitalisation, the authors performed a study which revealed different managerial approaches used in order to achieve digital entrepreneurial sustainability. With exploratory research, they (i) identified the strategic approaches of the businesses within the digital environment, (ii) analysed the importance of strategic objectives and the entrepreneurial vision, (iii) understood the long-term strategies and the costs of digitalisation, and (iv) analysed the future of the business in terms of cyber security. The study highlighted that no Romanian entrepreneur placed digitalisation as an independent objective for its company, showing that companies needed a proper digitalisation strategy correlated to the opportunities and threats of the business environment. Moreover, the Romanian entrepreneurs’ knowledge in cyber security was low even though they were aware that it was imperative to control critical information and develop data security strategy so as to avoid data theft/loss in the company. All the findings favoured conceptualising a new Digital Sustainable Entrepreneurship Model based on owners’ entrepreneurial visions and companies’ strategic objectives alike, a guide-framework to remain competitive in a sustainable, ever-growing market.

The present study aims to analyse the impact of collaborative networks on a firm’s international presence in contexts of emerging clusters in transition economies. The empirical study conducted here focuses on a sample of 42 firms belonging to the Muntenia-Oltenia wine cluster in Romania. Social network analysis techniques and non-parametric tests were applied to address the research questions. Findings reveal that companies’ external resources, mainly their relationships with other firms and institutions in the cluster, are essential aspects in promoting their access to international markets. Furthermore, with regard to the relationships between cluster companies and institutions, our results suggest that trade support institutions are relevant in supporting these internationalisation actions, while technical support institutions do not influence the international presence of cluster firms. These findings provide relevant insights for companies, institutions, and policymakers on the best way to promote cluster firms’ international participation.

This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach that combines unsupervised feature extraction through clustering and unsupervised feature selection for data reduction, specifically targeting high-dimensional data. The proposed method employs K-means clustering for feature extraction, where cluster membership serves as a new feature representation, capturing the inherent data characteristics. Subsequently, the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) and Random Forest algorithms are utilized for supervised feature selection, identifying the most relevant feature to enhance model performance. This hybrid approach leverages the strengths of both unsupervised and supervised learning techniques. The new algorithm was applied to 13 different tabular datasets, with 9 datasets showing significant improvements across various performance metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score) in both KNN and Random Forest models, despite substantial feature reduction. In the remaining four datasets, we achieved substantial dimensionality reduction with only negligible performance decreases. This improvement in performance while reducing dimensionality highlights the potential of the proposed method within the procedure, where datasets are treated without prior knowledge or assumptions. The proposed method offers a promising solution for handling high-dimensional data, enhancing model performance while maintaining interpretability and ease of integration within the proposed frameworks, with the ability to be irrespective of supervised or unsupervised designation datasets while reducing the dependency on a target or label features.