Evaluating the challenges of metaverse-enabled digital entrepreneurship: evidence from Saudi Arabia as an emerging economy

Purpose Although several papers have been published over the past decade on various aspects of digital entrepreneurship, nothing has hitherto been written on the theme of digital entrepreneurship in the metaverse. This paper, therefore, aims to explore the key challenges of digital entrepreneurship in the metaverse, with a view to developing a model to address these challenges. Design/methodology/approach The Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory approach was adopted in this study to rank the selected challenges in order of importance and establish a cause-and-effect relationship between them. The data were gathered from 10 experts from Saudi Arabia who deploy augmented reality, virtual reality and other immersive technologies in the course of their business. Findings Three challenges, namely, “Market fragmentation (C3)”, “Technical complexity (C1)” and “Monetisation and revenue models (C5)” were highlighted in the findings as the main factors of influence in the Cause group, whereas the remaining five challenges, “Infrastructure and connectivity (C2)”, “Social and ethical considerations (C8)”, “User adoption and engagement (C6)”, “Privacy and security (C7)” and “Intellectual property protection (C4)”, were categorised in the Effect group, being significantly influenced by the challenges in the Cause group. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the challenges of metaverse-enabled digital entrepreneurship and classify the identified challenges into groups of Cause and Effect.