The Growth of Cyber Entrepreneurship in the Food Industry: Virtual Community Engagement in the COVID-19 Era

Purpose: The sustainable development goals are the plans to accomplish a recovering and more sustainable future for all. However, with the COVID-19 epidemic, the challenges are more for achieving these goals by entrepreneurship. With the challenges of epidemics, new technological advancements have become the foundation of emerging forms of entrepreneurship, known as online entrepreneurship, technology-based entrepreneurship, digital entrepreneurship and cyber entrepreneurship. This form of entrepreneurship provides better opportunities for entrepreneurs to have community engagement to grow their platforms. Much has been written in the last decades about the traditional type of entrepreneurship and focused more on traditional business models. Furthermore, the role of cyber entrepreneurship has not been given much emphasis in the food industry. Nowadays, consumers prefer e-commerce platforms as a shopping means due to convenience, usefulness, and safety due to the coronavirus pandemic. Additionally, the food industry is a saturated and highly competitive market, and retailers have to add additional online services to survive and compete. Although recently, a small segment of burgeoning literature on this topic has tended to study Internet-based entrepreneurship, the existing literature offers only a partial understanding of those concepts specifically cyber entrepreneurship for community engagement in epidemics when people have less physical interaction, specifically, in the food industry. Design: Consequently, this study employs empirical research with a holistic overview of the existing literature in an attempt to define the different forms of entrepreneurship in the current digital age with a focus on COVID-19 implications for cyber entrepreneurship. Findings: Using a multiple case study approach, this study identifies and explores the fundamental aspects of cyber entrepreneurship. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are explained at the end of the paper.