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Source: Journal Citation ReportsTM from ClarivateTM 2022

Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues Open access
Journal Impact FactorTM (2022) 1.7
Journal Citation IndicatorTM (2022) 0.42
Received: 2020-02-19  |  Accepted: 2020-04-15  |  Published: 2020-06-30

Title

Innovation in African-American high-tech enterprises: a multi-agent approach


Abstract

African-American-owned high-tech enterprises and innovations are underrepresented in industry in comparison to non-African-American-owned ones. Various complex and intertwined socio-economic factors hinder the innovation capability of African-American-owned high-tech enterprises leading to underrepresentation of these businesses. Understanding the causal relationship between firm’s interactions with internal and external entities and its ability to innovate can foster the efforts of a high-tech enterprise in increasing and sustaining innovation capabilities. Agent-based modeling (ABM) emerges as one of the popular approaches to the study of complex socio-technological systems. Characterizing the organizational behavior of African-American-owned high-tech enterprises through the ABM perspective may provide a better understanding of the drivers, processes, and outcomes of this industry segment. By analyzing interview data among African-American entrepreneurs, this study proposes an ABM framework to represent and analyze the innovation capabilities of African-American-owned technology enterprises in comparison to other types of ownership. The ABM model illustrates the key involved agents, their attributes, actions, and the complex interactions amongst them. Simulation results indicate that African American population is underrepresented in the high-tech industry due to two significant factors of social and economic standings implying that the simulation trajectory is in the right direction. Model calibration, verification using real data and implementation plans related to policy development discussions and factors impacting African-American enterprises are also discussed in the study.


Keywords

African-American entrepreneur, agent-based model, high-technology, innovation, NetLogo, entrepreneurship


JEL classifications

L26 , O32 , J15


URI

http://jssidoi.org/jesi/article/574


DOI


Pages

3101-3121


This is an open access issue and all published articles are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Authors

London, Jeffrey O’Neal
University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, United States https://www.bridgeport.edu
Articles by this author in: CrossRef |  Google Scholar

Sheikh, Nasir Jamil
University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, United States https://www.bridgeport.edu
Articles by this author in: CrossRef |  Google Scholar

Journal title

Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues

Volume

7


Number

4


Issue date

June 2020


Issue DOI


ISSN

ISSN 2345-0282 (online)


Publisher

VšĮ Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Center, Vilnius, Lithuania

Cited

Google Scholar

Article views & downloads

HTML views: 2706  |  PDF downloads: 1364

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