Digital platforms

Digital platforms have changed the conditions influencing entrepreneurship across the globe. Research has shown that context is critical in understanding how these platforms impact entrepreneurial endeavors. This chapter illustrates how context is critical in understanding and analyzing how digital platforms influence entrepreneurial opportunities. It suggests that digital platforms represent a new type of intersection between the global and the local, where global forces promote conditions of dependent entrepreneurship. In contrast, local forces shape entrepreneurs’ agency in relation to the global processes. We suggest that, to ensure fair competition and just working conditions for platform entrepreneurs and employees within the industry, there is a need for policies not being steered by techno-skeptical or techno-optimistic frameworks but by a balanced approach. Since Joseph Schumpeter at least, it has been recognized that entrepreneurs discover and create opportunities and build new independent firms (Alvarez and Barney, 2007; Audretsch, 2007). More recently, scholars such as Brynjolffson and McAfee (2016) have hailed entrepreneurship as a vital response to the increasing concerns about digitization’s impact on entrepreneurship and the future of work. The impact of digital platforms on entrepreneurship has emerged simultaneously with a recognition of the importance of context in generic entrepreneurship research. Researching context in relation to digital platforms provides a particular challenge to researchers owing to their simultaneous global and localized nature; the interplay between the global and the local is more complex than in most other industries given the high digital interconnectivity and limited footlessness for many types of transactions and activities. A request on, for example, Innocentive, the world’s leading problem-solving digital platform, can be promoted to potential problem-solvers across the globe at the same time