Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
The bursting of the ‘dot com’ bubble in late 2000 had a profoundly negative effect on corporate presence on the Internet (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). Many Internet companies worldwide were merged or ceased operating in those years (Eisenmann, 2006). However, start-up firms and surviving companies have developed substantially since then. Richer and more complex functions have been developed via the Internet. New search systems, social media, information classification, community forums, personal blogs, integrating systems, and commercial interaction systems have continuously emerged online, gradually contributing to the formation of business ecologies. Special Internet-based platform mechanisms are changing the management strategies of traditional business models, shortening the distance between entrepreneurs and users, and accelerating the pace of innovation (Von Hippel et al., 2011; Jarwar et al., 2017).
With the rapidly expanding Internet economy, new business operation models are emerging. Entrepreneurship and innovative business models have become a point of special interest in the Internet era, and are also drawing attention from scholars (Teece, 2010; Zott et al., 2011; Lytras et al., 2017). A business model, in particular, the transformation of the entrepreneurship model via the design of an Internet business model, is of high importance for Internet entrepreneurs. A business model refers to the management mechanism used by an organization to create and acquire value (Dahan et al., 2010; Teece 2010). With regard to entrepreneurial implications, a study by Shane and Venkataraman (2000) emphasized the importance of business opportunities, suggesting that entrepreneurship should also include the processes of discovering, recognizing, measuring, and exploiting business opportunities. Some scholars elaborated on the definition using entrepreneurship characteristics. For example, Dollinger (2008) proposed three main characteristics of entrepreneurship, namely, creativity and innovation, resource integration and economic organization establishment, and opportunities and possibilities for growth in an environment full of risks and uncertainties. This study used three perspectives to understand the issues that require understanding in the Internet age in order to improve the survival rate and sustainable development of entrepreneurship. The three perspectives included the characteristics of entrepreneurship between the Internet and traditional age, the personal characteristics of entrepreneurs, and the capital resources and financing of entrepreneurs.
The rest of this article is organized as follows. The next section (Section 2) reviewed the differences between the Internet age and traditional entrepreneurship. Section 3 represents the entrepreneurs’ personal characteristics, while Section 4 discusses the capital resources and financing of entrepreneurs in the Internet age. Finally, the last section (Section 5) draws conclusions from the findings, offers extensions for future research and limitations of this study.