About this ebook
of an entrepreneur occurs in a whirl of events and often love prevails over rationality. Generally speaking, from one
side, love disrupts rationality, while from the other side, it lets us intensively understand situations.
We firmly maintain that love generates a critical spirit in a business context.
Thinking of the human side of a business, we seek to bring alive the meaning of love. Nowadays, we are experiencing
the renaissance of love in different contexts: love for the planet; love for communities; love for children; love for
human beings; and love for businesses.
Love is recognised as an opposite term to rationality, but in this context, we consider love as a crucial element of
the intellect. Love allows us to intensively experience situations. Without love, the intellect would collapse. Yet
love and rationality (or intellect) are crucial elements of business life.
We feel fully inspired to understand how love inhabits an organisational environment along with rationality. We
thought that the dance of love between a woman and a man can be compared to the love nurtured within a business.
When a man dates his special lover, he is a risk taker who makes an effort to invest time and money to achieve his goal. He persuades himself of the desirability of his woman by adopting creativity and positivity. He is passionate and resilient. He will never give up his lover if there is a strong commitment from both sides even if the future is uncertain. Moreover, timing is the most critical variable in this context; ‘when’ things are done is more important than ‘what’ is done. As this occurs in an
entrepreneurial journey, an entrepreneur appears as a risk taker who is goal-oriented, creative, positive, passionate,
resilient and committed.
The entrepreneurial scenario is widely pushed to become more digital. In turn, this has designed the start-up era
which embraces the gig-economy and industry 4.0 and comes after the knowledge economy. In particular, the
gig-economy is characterised by entrepreneurial ideas developed through Internet-based platforms.
It is considered a way out of worker precariousness. Industry 4.0, on the other hand, is based on business ideas realised
by the use of artificial intelligence (e.g., drones, humanoids, chatbots, etc).
In this context, we offer a collection of real business stories to explain the blend of love and business even if it can be
risky, painful and uncertain. All stories relive an emotional path. Some of those are ‘solo’ entrepreneurs and others
are couple entrepreneurs who started their journey while in love or ended their love while running the business; others co-founded the new venture with their partner. They are women and men, successful or not, certainly entrepreneurs
from all around the world Do not expect a holistic view of the concept of love. Love has nuanced meanings. We seek to explore all of them. We invite you to carefully read our stories and let your spirit flow towards new entrepreneurial adventures along with your love partner.
We firmly maintain that love generates a critical spirit in a business context.
A beautiful and inspiring experiential journal from Veronica Scuotto and Nicola Farronato, with endorsements from Darin Bifani and Manlio del Giudice.
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About the author
Veronica (Ph.D., FHEA, MBA, BA-Honour) joined the University of Turin (Italy) after working at the University of the West of Scotland (UK) and then at the Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci in Paris (France) as an associate professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She obtained the Italian National qualification as Full Professor in 2020. She received a Ph.D. in Marketing and Enterprise Management from Milan Bicocca University (Italy). She has been invited as a guest speaker to GfWM Knowledge Camp; World Young Forum; and PDW at the AoM Conference, among others. In 2018, she organised a conference on ‘Cognitive Perspective in Entrepreneurship Research’ jointly with IPAG University in Paris. She teaches entrepreneurship and loves encouraging young student entrepreneurs to develop new, creative business ideas. Veronica has also combined this interest with her research focus on small to medium enterprises, knowledge management and digital technologies. She has published several articles featured in peer-to-peer journals, such as the Journal of Product Innovation Management (4*), Journal of World Business (4*), Journal of Organizational Behaviour (4*), Journal of Business Research (3*), Production Planning & Control (3*), Technological Forecasting and Social Change (3*), International Marketing Review (3*), and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (3*), among others. She has authored two books. Veronica is the Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Intellectual Capital and an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Knowledge Management. Veronica is also a member of the International Council for Small Business and is a mentor for the Techstars Smart Mobility Accelerator in Turin, Italy. In 2020, Veronica’s work, published on the Journal of Organizational Behaviour, was awarded as the tenth most cited article. She also received two awards as the best Paper of the EuroMed/SIMA track ‘New Challenges in Open Innovation’ in 2016 and the ‘best-commended paper’ in 2017 at the annual EuroMed Academy of Business (EMAB) conference. In 2018, she was recognised by the International Council for Small Business (ICSB) as a global partner of excellence. She also has an industrial background. She worked as a commercial manager at GNS China (consultancy company) based in Beijing (China), she was a marketing consultant for a fashion publishing and advertising agency, Ichnos Srl, in Naples (Italy), and was a digital account manager at P.O.S.H. marketing agency in Glasgow (the United Kingdom).
Nicola is both a manager and entrepreneur who likes to build new innovative projects and ventures. He has extensive experience as an international business developer who has worked in several European cities such as Venice, London, Dublin, Paris and Turin. He practises and experiences entrepreneurship. He develops creative projects in the digital world and has a natural sense of transforming a mere idea into a fruitful business. Nicola founded B-sm@rk in Ireland, a high potential tech start-up; Back2Africa in Italy, a social entrepreneurship venture raising funds for Togo & Benin kids; and VCNY (Venice Chinese New Year) in Italy, a destination marketing project focusing on Chinese millennial travellers. He is currently head of the innovation team for the City of Turin and acts as innovation manager for Torino City Lab. Nicola just enrolled as a Ph.D. student at the University of Turin with a focus on innovation for the circular economy. Finally, Nicola has been a guest speaker in many international conferences about innovation, start-up and smart cities, such as: EU Innovation Convention 2011 in Bruxelles; 21Minuti-The human start-up 2015 in Milan; Amadeus Customer Loyalty conference 2015 in Guadalupe; Traveldaily Conference 2016 in Shanghai; ITB China 2017 in Shanghai; TravelTech Conference Russia 2017 in Moscow; Smart City Expo 2019 in Barcelona; and Prague City Data Congress 2020, among others.
