(1) Purpose: The main objective of this research was to determine if and how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted new entrepreneurial opportunities. The study also focused on finding the means of actions that can positively affect the future entrepreneurial field. (2) Methodology: Initially, the literature review was approached, the complementary evaluation of the researchers’ interest sustaining the timeliness of the analyzed topic. The empirical analysis implied conducting a multiple statistical regression on how the new entrepreneurial opportunities can be affected by relevant variables. (3) Findings: The obtained results highlighted a potential beneficial effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship, namely determining new entrepreneurial opportunities. The need to consider new directions of action in entrepreneurship was also outlined, the online migration and the adaption to new market configurations being considered essential promoters of change. (4) Practical Implications/Originality/Value: Although existing research focused, to a large extent, on analyzing the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on entrepreneurship, few of them highlighted a future perspective that would ensure the continuity of entrepreneurial processes in extreme conditions, such as those under study. The present research could contribute to the specialty literature enrichment while serving as guidance to the entrepreneurship practitioners towards the implementation of long-term visions and processes.

Background: Using the power of Internet, crowdfunding platforms are currently changing the traditional landscape of fundraising. Social media-based IT platforms in particular are bringing the creators of crowdfunding projects closer than ever to potential investors. A large variety of factors function as determinants of individuals' intention to participate in crowdfunding and have an intertwined impact on funding as the ultimate project goal.Objectives: For a better understanding of investor behavior in social media-based crowdfunding projects, this paper covers identifying, analyzing, and classifying general and specific factors of investor motivation, based on the literature in the field.The main focus is the relationship between the affordances provided by social media-based crowdfunding platforms and the psychological determinants of investor motivation in innovative start-up projects.Methods: Using IEEE Explore, Clarivate Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and Scopus, we conducted a systematic review of the existing research on the emerging role of crowdfunding as a disruptive technology in financing the start-up innovative projects. The paper explores the main determinants of investor motivation and aims to streamline the success factors in crowdfunding campaigns.Results: A total of 1,216 publications were identified after searching the aforementioned databases and, upon refining the results, 515 articles were considered for the final sample. After reading the titles and abstracts, the sample was reduced to 78 articles that were read in-depth and synthesized in accordance with the defined research questions. The selected articles were clustered into three main categories: general studies, determinants of investor behavior, and success factors.Conclusions: In the new global economy, crowdfunding platforms have become the nexus between the emerging creators of innovative products and services and the necessary funding sources. This connection is possible via a cumulative collection of contributions from multiple investors recruited from the audience of the selected platform, without time or space constraints. However, the determinants of the investment decision are very different in the case of social media-based crowdfunding platforms compared to determinants in the mainstream environment. This paper surveys these motivators and reveals how platform features can be used to persuade individuals to make a financial contribution toward the success of a project.

Content Analysis, which is a part of qualitative analysis, has mainly been studied in scientific articles from health and medicine domains. With the emerge of social networks, there are new opportunities for content analysis, which can be used to analyse user generated content, from various sources. Nevertheless, the companies are investing millions of dollars in content analysis, which is often known as sentiment analysis. The discussion in this article helps to understand the main concepts of content analysis for those interested in the domain of qualitative analysis, with the help of automated and manual qualitative research. The overall conclusion is that automated qualitative analysis is dependent on how accurate is the tool used and this feature can be checked with the help of manual qualitative analysis.

The European Green Deal (EGD) represents a new and ambitious growth strategy proposed by the European Commission for transforming the EU into a prosperous and resilient society based on competitive economy, efficiency in terms of resource allocation and a green environment. Under these circumstances, the aim of the present research is to highlight the main criticisms of the European Green Deal by taking into consideration the competition and entrepreneurial dimensions of the common market. Methodologically, the research entails a systematic review of the specialty literature and, alongside this, a preliminary bibliometric study on the analysed topic. Therefore, several critical issues on the European Green Deal’s impact on entrepreneurship and competition are highlighted. The research results illustrate that the European Green Deal affects entrepreneurial activity through a prioritization of the environmental dimension, despite the free market. Aiming to achieve the stated goals, the EGD provides the context of governmental interventions and regulations, which will distort entrepreneurship and competitional processes through fiscal policies and other instruments. The lack of clarity, the ambiguous objectives and the overall costs are also weaknesses of the European Green Deal, as highlighted by the present research. Even if it seems impressive on paper, many researchers demonstrated its inefficiency and impossibility. However, the research results are far away from denying the importance of the European Green Deal, considering the long-term perspective.

Utilizing readily accessible information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as mobile devices, applications, and simple Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and harnessing their potential through Experimentation as a Service (EaaS), crowdsensing, and gamification, represents one of the most effective approaches to implementing co-creation in smart cities. The benefits of this bottom-up approach are closely related to accurately identifying the real needs of city residents and increasing the chances of designing and implementing solutions with genuine impact, ensuring equity, social inclusion, sustainability, and community resilience. This paper investigates the utilization of ICTs to support social sustainability by analyzing 157 smart city projects funded under the Horizon 2020 program at the European Union level and 5 smart city projects from Canada. The results reveal the utilization of technological solutions such as testbeds, living labs, EaaS, crowdsensing, open data, and more for co-creation in smart city projects. In the discussion part, we point out the importance of focusing on technologies that are familiar to the beneficiaries and on leveraging resources already available as wearable devices or in the citizens’ homes, the versatility of the technological solutions analyzed, the role of heterogeneous and open data, and cross-disciplinary teams in creating new perspectives on urban problems, reducing inequity in the development of solutions to solve them. The concerns raised and problems reported relate to the technology itself (errors in operation), users (difficulties in stimulating their involvement and keeping it constant), and data (quality of data collected, difficult to process, ethics and security of data collection and use). Based on our results, we extract, synthetize and present six distinct categories of lessons learned by the implementation teams of the analyzed projects.