Search results

The purpose of this paper is to measure the high-quality entrepreneurial efficiency of family-owned small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) while exploring the potential determinants of their performance. This study places particular emphasis on the firms' technological competencies and internationalization efforts. The authors aim to shed light on the internal and external characteristics that impact the efficiency of family SMEs.

This study adopts a two-stage approach. In the first stage, a data envelopment analysis model is utilized to measure the high-quality entrepreneurial efficiency of family SMEs. To achieve this, this study considered as outputs three key quality aspects of entrepreneurship, namely innovativeness, export orientation and turnover rate, while the inputs were the number of employees and the business environment. Then, in the second stage, the efficiency scores are regressed against a set of environmental factors that may affect the efficiency. The proposed efficiency measurement models are utilized with a particularly rich dataset of 1,910 family SMEs from 35 developed countries.

The results demonstrated that the efficiency of family SMEs primarily engaged in the production of goods was significantly higher than those providing services. Importantly, the presence of barriers related to innovation and digitalization had a pronounced negative impact on efficiency. Additionally, scale-up firms exhibited higher levels of efficiency. When examining family SMEs within their national context, it was observed that non-EU countries and countries with a higher gross domestic product displayed significantly higher efficiencies.

The findings of this research provide guidance for the development of entrepreneurship-oriented policies that consider both the internal characteristics of family SMEs and the diverse socioeconomic contexts in which they operate.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a generic approach that prevents a specific class of code injection attacks (CIAs) in a novel way.

To defend against CIAs this approach involves detecting attacks by using location‐specific signatures to validate code statements. The signatures are unique identifiers that represent specific characteristics of a statement's execution. The key property that differentiates the scheme presented in this paper is that these characteristics do not depend entirely on the code statement, but also take into account elements from its execution context.

The approach was applied successfully to defend against attacks targeting structured query language (SQL), XML Path Language and JavaScript with positive results.

Despite many countermeasures that have been proposed the number of CIAs has been increasing. Malicious users seem to find new ways to introduce compromised embedded executable code to applications by using a variety of languages and techniques. Hence, a generic approach that defends against such attacks would be a useful countermeasure. This approach can defend attacks that involve both domain‐specific languages (e.g. SQL) and general purpose languages (e.g. JavaScript) and can be used both against client‐side and server‐side attacks.

This paper aims to examine whether private healthcare entrepreneurship can flourish and overcome obstacles in cases of a free-access public health system and periods of strict public policies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the paper aims to illuminate the wider social role of private healthcare entrepreneurship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper adopts a qualitative methodological strategy through 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews with the owners of diagnostic centres located in small Greek towns.

Private healthcare entrepreneurship flourished and played a significantly positive social role in the context of a degraded public health sector, which lacked investments for more than ten years and was further depleted by its recent focus on COVID-19 incidents. This paper reveals that although public policies that aimed to deal with COVID-19 produced serious consequences, business activity adapted to the new circumstances.

Future research can combine the findings of this paper with the views of stakeholders, policymakers and social actors.

This paper's value lies in its efforts to expand our current knowledge regarding the impact of COVID-19 public policies on entrepreneurship.