Digital social entrepreneurship: the N-Helix response to stakeholders' COVID-19 needs.

This study explores the emergence of a new entrepreneurship phenomenon (digital social entrepreneurship) as a result of the collaboration among many agents (N-Helix), given the government's limited capacity to respond to the stakeholders' needs satisfaction related to an exogenous event (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). Our theory development is based on three ongoing academic debates related to (a) the unrepresentativeness of the stakeholder theory in entrepreneurship research; (b) the emergence of digital social entrepreneurship (DSE) as a bridge between stakeholders' needs, socio-economic actors, and digital-social initiatives; and (c) the role of N-Helix collaborations to facilitate the emergence of global knowledge-intensive initiatives and the rapid adoptions of open innovations. Our results support our assumptions about the positive mediation effect of DSE in the relationship between N-Helix collaborations and stakeholders' satisfaction. Notably, results show how pandemic has intensified these relationships and how DSE in N-Helix collaborations can generate social impacts globally. Some implications for policy-makers have emerged from our results that should be considered during/post-COVID-19 pandemic.

Assessment of Culture Systems to Produce Bacterial Cellulose with a Kombucha Consortium.

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is an emerging material for high-end applications due to its biocompatibility and physicochemical characteristics. However, the scale-up production of this material is still expensive, with the culture medium constituting one-third of the total cost. Herein, four different media (yeast nitrogen base, YNB; Murashige and Skoog, MSO; black tea; and NPK fertilizer solution) were compared while using sucrose as an additional carbon source. The yields of BC were best for YNB and fertilizer with 0.37 and 0.34 gBC/gC respectively. These two were then compared using glucose as a carbon source, with improvements in the production of 29% for the fertilizer, while only an 8% increase for YNB was seen; however, as the carbon concentration increased with a fixed N concentration, the yield was lower but the rate of production of BC increased. The obtained BC films were sanitized and showed low molecular weight and all the expected cellulose characteristic FT-IR bands while SEM showed nanofibers around 0.1 µm. Compared to traditional methods for lab-scale production, the use of the fertilizer and the consortium represent benefits compared to traditional lab-scale BC culture methods such as a competitive cost (two times lower) while posing resilience and tolerance to stress conditions given that it is produced by microbial communities and not with a single strain. Additionally, the low molecular weight of the films could be of interest for certain coating formulations.