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The Introduction presents hope and organizing as radical ideas in the times of the interregnum. The book is outlined and its main thrust is narrated.

Hope is a paradoxical place. It is where we store what we long for and what we are fearful of at the same time. It is where we acknowledge the fragility of our lives. Hope lies in uncertainty.

Family firms represent over 90 percent of businesses around the world and often play a more significant role in the economies of nations. The impact of the family on organizational behavior and firm performance is the factor that makes the difference between family and non-family firms. To illustrate how the family as a variable can be used to generate theory in a broad explanatory sense, we need to investigate both micro- and macro-levels of organizations. At a micro-level, family firms’ heterogeneity may be explained in terms of how the family behaves and intervenes in the business. At a macro-level, a possible explanation of such diversity is the institutional context, that is the general framework that influences firms’ behavior and strategy along the dimensions of culture, innovation propensity, law, governance rules, economic and financial constraints, and so on. Indeed, the family as a social unit can be considered another dimension of the institutional context. The book contributes in all these directions through theoretical and empirical chapters from different institutional contexts.

Techno-entrepreneurship is defined as the entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activities of both incumbent and nascent companies operating in a technology- or knowledge-intensive environment that encourages and fosters the development and introduction of technology-based and knowledge-intensive novel products, services, production methods, or business models (Therin, 2009; 2014). It serves as an important conduit to firm growth, job and new industry creation, and economic development (Acs et al., 2016; Audretsch, 2007; Baumol, 2010; Carree and Thurik, 2003; Yoon et al., 2018). Despite its significant socio-economic and spillover effects across other constituents of the global economy, technoentrepreneurship entails high risk and uncertainty that are mainly derived from the fast and dynamically changing nature of technology. Drawing on dynamic and broad views on the phenomenon, this handbook aims to deepen our understanding of techno-entrepreneurship by proposing novel theoretical frameworks, introducing emerging categories of techno-entrepreneurship, and exploring new patterns in entrepreneurial ecosystems and across different countries by using a variety of unique data sources. First, current research is showing that new theoretical frameworks are needed in order to cope with the growing relevance of techno-entrepreneurship initiatives in different countries (Shan et al., 2018; Chaudhry et al., 2018; Judge et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2009; Venkataram, 2004; Phan and Der Foo, 2004; Baark, 1994). At the same time, we have relatively little understanding about emerging categories of entrepreneurship. Accordingly, we include a chapter dedicated to proposing new roles of technological embeddedness in techno-entrepreneurship, and explore relatively new categories of entrepreneurship that are closely related to reverse and frugal innovation, the drone industry, and gender-specific entrepreneurship.