The COVID-19 pandemic has not only had a significant and catastrophic effect on business and economies globally, but has identified the external and internal enablement of new venture creation. This paper aims to provide entrepreneurship insights, implementations and dynamics to demonstrate the role of entrepreneurship in times of such adversity within an Australian context. We provide emergent enquiry narratives from leading Australian scholars, identifying entrepreneurial initiatives as a catalyst to new venture creation and growth. Narratives include insights associated with the entrepreneurial mindset, the multidimensional effects of resilience and entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurship enablers and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Opportunities for further research are identified, particularly regarding context and empirical outcomes. We postulate that entrepreneurship may well be the unsung hero during the current COVID-19 economic crisis.

Purpose: The purpose of this practitioner paper is to explore whether the principles of Design Thinking and the Lean Startup could be employed in developing a disruptive model for delivering educational programs within higher education in a way that attempts to eliminate the multitude of problems facing this industry, while simultaneously adhering to the principles of frugal innovation and meeting relevant sustainability goals.Design/methodology/approach: The authors followed a design thinking approach, employing tools such as empathy mapping, customer journey, value proposition and semi-structured interviews to obtain a deep level of understanding of the problems educators and students within the context of entrepreneurship education are facing. Throughout the process they drew on the practice of emergent inquiry and customer co-creation to help guide decision making.Findings: The authors successfully derived a conceptual solution in the form of a Minimum Viable Product of which the features were tested against the multitude of user needs and requirements. It was possible to demonstrate how the solution meets all nine of the requirements for frugal innovations while simultaneously adhering to applicable sustainability principles.Practical implications: The proposed solution offers a potential opportunity to first-movers in chosen academic disciplines to become leaders in online education.Originality/value: Even in an industry such as higher education there is a dire need for frugality and finding sustainable solutions for educators and students in both developed and developing markets. With this paper the authors succeed in presenting innovative combinations of digital artefacts, platforms and infrastructure to arrive at a novel crowd-sourced solution that is unique in its design.

This study investigates the dynamic pathways of organisational resilience among Ukrainian firms operating in a war economy. Our research highlights the profound impact of armed conflicts on commerce, emphasising the need for businesses to develop resilience strategies to mitigate risks and maintain operations. Through an examination of organisational data representing the 2‐year period following Russia's full‐scale invasion of Ukraine, our findings support the presence of two resilience pathways previously described in the extant literature, ‘bounce‐back’ and ‘bounce‐beyond’ and expose two new pathways which we have labelled ‘bounce‐less’ and ‘bounce‐boom.’ Our findings reveal the complex and varying paths of organisational resilience resulting from changes in market demand and resource availability, underscoring the importance of organisational adaptability, resourcefulness and innovation. We also propose a broader definition of resilience than is currently found in the literature – one which recognises the challenges of achieving a baseline of organisational survival in a time of crisis. The article concludes with practical implications and recommendations for future research on resilience in wartime conditions.

As they grow, companies that were once characterised as agile, innovative and entrepreneurial, tend to become bureaucratic and slow to respond to changes in their environments. In order to stay competitive and build competitive advantage, managers realise that they have to rejuvenate the entrepreneurial spirit and innovate on a sustainable basis, yet this remains a significant challenge for them. Our corporate entrepreneurship and innovation course for post-graduate studentscultivates and understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation in the context of established business. Its unique design, which follows a logical progression of data collection in real-life participating organizations through secondary and primary research, assures in-depth understanding of the factors that shape the current organizational profiles. Students, working in teams, draw on this data and entrepreneurship and innovation theory to develop practical corporate entrepreneurship development plans which they present to their ‘clients’. These plans reflect leadership orientation represented by entrepreneurial visions and strategies, as well as contextualised factors for control in the form of innovation processes and tools. Finally, teams recommend a range of tactics that foster supportive environments for entrepreneurship and innovation. In the process of doing so, students are themselves transformed from being traditional managers to becoming entrepreneurial managers.