The Design Society unites researchers and practitioners to advance innovative engineering design. As entrepreneurship grows in importance, integrate design principles into its education seems necessary. This paper reviews Design Society publications to map how entrepreneurship, education, and sustainability intersect, it identifies the Design Society’s contributions in the field to propose strategies and future research to strengthen its influence. It highlights the possible role of the Design Society in leading education advancements in entrepreneurship and sustainability.

This article examines the role of Dutch merchants, entrepreneurs, and artisans in the circulation of technological knowledge, skills, and commercial expertise between the Low Countries and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the early seventeenth century. Focusing on projects promoted under Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici, it analyses attempts to introduce sugar refining, salt processing, and mill technologies into the port of Livorno. Rather than treating innovation as a simple transfer of techniques from one place to another, the article shows how technological circulation depended on the mobility of skilled actors, the mediation of commercial networks, and the support of political authorities. At the same time, it highlights the fragility of these processes: even under favourable legal and economic conditions, migrant ventures could fail or remain incomplete. By reconstructing the interactions between Dutch entrepreneurs, intermediaries, and Medici officials, the article argues that early modern technological innovation emerged from negotiation, adaptation, and the practical use of embodied expertise in a new environment. In this way, the Livorno case shows both the opportunities and the limits of migrant-driven innovation in the early modern Mediterranean and contributes to a broader understanding of how mobility shaped technological circulation on the ground.

The nineteenth-century British cooperative movement identified competition as the central feature of the mode of production dominating the British economy. Most often, cooperators took the competitive system to be the antithesis of their own system of mutual assistance. Yet John Stuart Mill, even while endorsing and predicting the replacement of the capitalists’ economy with a cooperative one, insists that this new mode must not desert competition. Mill holds that without competition a cooperative system will fail to achieve progress. Competition between cooperative associations is necessary to encourage investment and technological change. As an outstanding classical economist, Mill might reasonably have been expected to develop a theory of the dynamic equalization of returns across cooperative industries. But Mill fails to complete his theory of cooperative competition. He leaves numerous questions unaddressed. In particular, he does not explain what will happen to cooperatives that fall behind. Are these a source of unemployment? Will there be a business cycle? How will new products be developed? At root, Mill fails to develop a theory of entrepreneurship under cooperation.

In the early twentieth century, the Malayan pineapple was the cheapest but most consumed canned fruit in Britain, most of which was produced by local Chinese enterprises in British Malaya. Current historiography of the Malayan pineapple industry has highlighted its lack of automation and branding that made the canned pineapples low quality and therefore cheap; a consequence of colonial commodity production framework that prioritized rubber exports. A key assumption is that Britain’s high demand for Malayan pineapples was mainly driven by the harsh economic conditions during the Depression years. However, using previously unexamined colonial newspaper reports and archival sources on the Empire Marketing Board, this study sheds light on how two representatives of the pineapple industry—Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong Chian—actively leveraged colonial ties and production cheapness to corner imperial markets. This study’s contribution is two-fold. First, it expands the Malayan pineapple industry’s current historiography by situating it within the broader debates on imperial marketing, commodity chains, and local entrepreneurship. By focusing on the marketing strategies which Chinese entrepreneurs devised within a colonial framework, it adds nuance to the literature on local entrepreneurship and the trajectories of a secondary commodity sector in British colonies. Second, it challenges the predominantly ethnically essentialist readings of Chinese business strategies under colonialism of Southeast Asia, by demonstrating how intra-ethnic cooperation was not always effective in business modernization. In this case, leveraging colonial and imperial ties to navigate colonial logic in commodity trade and production was more useful, even though its success was transient.

In the fifteenth century, Portuguese economic migrants frequented the African coasts to trade in gold and captives. From the seventeenth century onwards, African trade attracted other French, English, and Dutch migrants, who, individually or grouped together in trading companies, settled on African coasts as part of a global trading economy based on the circulation of goods, ideas, knowledge, know-how, and techniques. These exchanges fostered a cultural and racial melting pot in the trading cities of Gorée and Saint-Louis. Indeed, the union between Europeans and the women of Senegambia fostered the birth of a new Afro-European social class that served as an intermediary for commercial activities and technological dialogue. In the second half of the eighteenth century, thanks to their wealth from the slave economy, Afro-Europeans contributed to the urban transformation of the towns of Gorée and Saint-Louis, replicating Provençal houses built using European and local techniques and materials. Following the prohibition of the slave trade by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the royal French administration embarked on a slow process of urban transformation in Saint-Louis, the first French city in West Africa, attempting to construct public and military buildings and impose a European-style urban planning.

In the 1890s a small group of Japanese men settled in a Pacific Island group of Truk (today called Chuuk, located within the federated states of Micronesia). The settlers, who found home in several of the islets surrounded by one of the world’s largest coral reef lagoons, arrived a few decades before the islands became occupied by the Japanese navy and eventually went under Japanese colonial rule with the mandate from the League of Nations in 1920. These earliest migrants had lost their privilege and financial base in the recent regime change in Japan. They are often seen as a pioneer of Japan’s southward imperial expansion, but a closer look reveals that the core of their activity was the export of copra in exchange for contraband firearms. They managed to carry out this trade due to the access to firearms in Japan as well as the kinship network that they forged with Trukese Islanders and other settlers from Europe. By examining the economic and sociocultural background of this copra-dynamite trade in Truk, this paper tries to show how entrepreneurship by migrants could be conditioned by global flows of technological innovation and the conditions of the migrants’ home country.

This study offers a systematic and theory-informed integrative synthesis of research at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and entrepreneurship. Although interest in this domain has expanded rapidly, existing research remains fragmented, technology centered, and weakly connected to theories of entrepreneurial decision-making. To address this gap, the study adopts a hybrid review design that combines a systematic literature review with bibliometric co-word analysis and thematic synthesis. Based on 372 articles indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection (2010–2025), the analysis maps the intellectual structure, thematic landscape, and temporal evolution of AI–entrepreneurship research. Four thematic quadrants are identified, reflecting core applications, transversal foundations, isolated specializations, and peripheral themes. The synthesis shows that AI is largely conceptualized as a functional input, while cognitive and behavioral dimensions of entrepreneurial judgment remain marginal. Building on these insights, the article proposes a cognitively informed research agenda to guide future work.