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There is a great worldwide desire to launch new technology-based business. In this sense, and increasingly, entrepreneurship courses have arisen in several universities and many of the courses in the management, administration and engineering areas already offer entrepreneurship curricular units. Throughout those programs, the teams develop key integrated competencies in innovation, entrepreneurship and technology that will ultimately enable the students to create and develop new technology-based businesses. The Business Plan Reference Manual for IT Businesses provides a reference manual for undergraduate and graduate students that intend to launch their start-up business in the IT field. It helps them to create and model the business plan of their business. Therefore, this manual is mainly aimed at instructors who want to offer a practical view of the process of modeling, designing and developing an IT start-up. Additionally, it can be individually used by entrepreneurs who wish to launch their start-up businesses in IT field. The structure of the book was defined taking into account different approaches to the construction of the business plan, which basically consider a disaggregation of some of these chapters in others smaller (e.g., marketing plan into products/services and market, financial plan into investment plan and economic-financial projections). We chose to aggregate these dimensions into a single chapter, which in our view facilitates the process of analyzing a business plan. It is also relevant to mention the inclusion of "Chapter V - Prototype description" which is innovative and intends to take into account the application of this business plan template to the information technology sector. © 2018 River Publishers. All rights reserved.

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The purpose of this special issue is to assemble high quality papers that deepen and boost understanding the role of open innovation and knowledge on business ecosystems development. This special issue includes ten papers specific related to the special issue topic: Open Innovation and Knowledge for Fostering Business Ecosystems. Jointly, the papers scrutinize and explore this subject using different theoretical backgrounds and methodologies. Individually, each paper provides interesting insights concerning the singularities they explore. (C) 2018 Journal of Innovation & Knowledge. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U.

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Purpose Considering the differences between rural and urban spaces, through the theoretical framework developed, the purpose of this paper is to uncover and rationalize the differences between rural and urban new ventures in terms of the environment surrounding the new venture, their general characteristics (e.g. sector, size) and export/economic performance. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical framework is empirically assessed resorting to exploratory statistical analysis based on data collected from a questionnaire survey responded by 408 new ventures headquartered in Portuguese business incubators and science parks. The data collected were treated with the Software Package for the Social Sciences. Findings The results evidence that rural and urban new ventures differ in terms of generic characteristics, namely sector, size and collaborators' human capital. Additionally, they differ concerning export and economic performance as well in relation to the perception of the municipality support. Originality/value The present study innovatively contributes to uncover the role of rural and urban context in entrepreneurship and adds to the scanty empirical literature in the area.

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