Opportunities and Barriers for Entrepreneurship in the Metaverse Age

Introduction

In traditional times, who combined the factors of production to create goods and services that satiated consumer demands while also pursuing profit and taking on risk. Today, a new business ecosystem and a new parallel business universe emerge with the traditional world, called the “metaverse.” New business opportunities and threats are revealed, a new form of entrepreneurship that will create added value that will create benefits. This situation necessitates new business opportunities and a new kind of entrepreneurial activity appropriate for the Metaverse's functioning universe. In the Metaverse universe, entrepreneurship must replace traditional times' local, regional, or national entrepreneurship. In this metaverse entrepreneurship, unlike industrial entrepreneurship, unlike creating a new product by processing raw materials, changing their shape, assembling and assembling, things are not done in the actual world, but a metaverse, world parallel to this one. This is a new example of creative entrepreneurship based on “web 3” technology. In innovative/creative entrepreneurship, work is done in a virtual environment and with virtual-world resources rather than in the real environment and with real-world resources. All of the work is done in the virtual environment and with the raw materials of the virtual environment. In contemporary society, rapidly increasing new technological developments create new opportunities for entrepreneurs. As a result of the development of information and communication technology and related innovations, a new economy known as the “digital economy” has been produced. The digital economy provides tremendous opportunities for numerous entrepreneurs to launch new businesses in a variety of industries (Hafezieh et al., 2011). The steady growth of digital technology, in particular since the mid-1990s, has created digital ventures whose business models are built on generating value through electronic information via data networks (Kollmann, 2006).

In a broad sense, digital entrepreneurship within the digital ecosystem refers to the creation of new ventures and the transformation of current businesses through the development of new digital technologies or applications (Shen et al., 2018; Ferreira et al., 2019). High-intensity digital technologies are a defining characteristic of digital entrepreneurs, who use them to enhance the operations of businesses and produce novel products and services, as well as new business models, while also interacting with stakeholders and customers. Digital entrepreneurs operate in a metaverse universe, taking advantage of different opportunities provided by the Internet, the World Wide Web, mobile technologies, the use of digital media, and other technological advances in communication and information (Beliaeva et al., 2020). With the development of the new generation of Internet (Web 3.0) infrastructure, the acceleration of digital transformation brings new business opportunities and entrepreneurship forms to the agenda. Digital transformation brings about current concepts and practices by creating changes in many areas (Lee et al., 2021). Digitization is becoming a new source of innovation in all sectors by forcing and restructuring business models. In this process, entrepreneurs are not only the driving forces of digitalization but also the affected actors. In addition to having numerous layers of connectivity and output forms as a stand-alone process of managing digital business platforms, the digital entrepreneurship area is becoming a significant driver of contemporary innovation structures and ecosystem models (Satalkina & Steiner 2020).