“To boldly go where no [man] has gone before” - Institutional voids and the development of women's digital entrepreneurship11The title is taken from the original titles voice-over for the TV series Star Trek from launch in 1966 to 1987:Space: The final frontierThese are the voyages of the Starship, EnterpriseIts 5 year missionTo explore strange new worldsTo seek out new life and new civilizationsTo boldly go where no man has gone beforeThe phrase appears to have its origins in a paper prepared by the Presidential Science Advisory Committee (1958), which referred to the ‘compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before’. In 1987 with Star Trek: The Next Generation the wording was changed to ‘… where no one has gone before’ [in response to accusations of sexism]

This paper examines the emergence of digital entrepreneurship in the context of emerging economies. Given that these economies generally lack a well-developed institutional framework, we draw on the concept of institutional voids as our theoretical lens. We argue that digital entrepreneurship facilitates the navigation and bridging of socio-cultural institutional voids but also provides opportunities for entrepreneurs to directly and indirectly alter the existing institutional context. We illustrate these arguments by drawing upon six biographical narrations of female digital entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, through our development of a multi-level model, we make explicit the two-way causal interaction between entrepreneurial action, institution altering behaviour and the social and cultural context, thus providing a framework for future research.