Provides an internationally grounded and critical review of grassroots sustainability enterprises, focusing on the processes that lead to their formation, the governing context that shapes their evolution, the benefits they create and the challenges that they face in different contexts.

Entrepreneurial Communities and Ecosystems: Case Study Insights aims to provide applied examples that embody the theories, principles, and processes that contribute to empowering everyday entrepreneurial communities and ecosystems. Relying on a diversity of narratives from a wide range of entrepreneurial communities, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and organizations, this book presents a collection of case studies that take the reader inside the minds of leaders who are working to empower entrepreneurs and build entrepreneurial ecosystems and entrepreneurial communities—sometimes from scratch. The book features research and stories from entrepreneurs, development agencies, entrepreneurial support and assistance organizations (i.e. feeders and supports), governments, and involved citizens and local leaders in their quest to make their communities more entrepreneuring. The book presents an analytic frame through which the case studies are cross-analyzed, providing meta-guidelines for pursuing a broad range of strategies for supporting local and regional entrepreneurial action. This research volume is equally useful as an undergraduate or graduate text on the sociology of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship as it is a field guide for ecosystem builders, policy makers, nonprofits, and entrepreneurship and social researchers worldwide.

Governments around the globe are promoting co-production and community social enterprise as policy strategies to address the need for local, 21st century service provision but can small communities engage spontaneously in social enterprise and what is the true potential for citizens to produce services? This book addresses a clutch of contemporary societal challenges including: aging demography and the consequent need for extended care in communities; public service provision in an era of retrenching welfare and global financial crises; service provision to rural communities that are increasingly 'hollowed out' through lack of working age people; and, how best to engender the development of community social enterprise organizations capable of providing high quality, accessible services. It is packed with information and evidence garnered from research into the environment for developing community social enterprise and co-producing services; how communities react to being asked to co-produce; what to expect in terms of the social enterprises they can produce; and, how to make them happen. This book is an antidote to the rhetoric of optimistic governments that pronounce co-production as a panacea to the challenges of providing local services and by drawing on the evidence from a 'real-life' international study will make policymakers more savvy about their aspirations for co-production, give service professionals practical strategies for working with communities, fill a gap in the academic evidence about community, as opposed to individual, social enterprise and reassure community members that they can deliver services through community social enterprise if the right partnerships and strategies are in place. Community CoProduction will appeal to students and scholars over a broad range of disciplines including development, entrepreneurship, public and social policy, economics and regional studies.

Toward Entrepreneurial Community Development is about developing entrepreneurial communities, and goes beyond theories of the firm to demonstrate how local and regional society contributes in important ways to the vitality of entrepreneurs. The literature is rich with insights about leadership and culture within SMEs, and the behaviours and attitudes of their founders, founding teams, and managers. Since most of the attention in the entrepreneurship literature is focused on firms, we wish to explore everyone else: The social environment surrounding the entrepreneur, and how leadership and culture outside the firm can have pervasive effects on the business. This book reaches across disciplinary boundaries, integrating and advancing knowledge on entrepreneurial community development. The book identifies actionable leadership strategies that can be used by literally anyone to help make a community or region a more culturally-supportive, interactive home for entrepreneurial minds. We draw from original research to compare high and low entrepreneurship communities, and present an emergent picture of how community-level actors can (or fail to) work together to support entrepreneurship in places that are culturally distant from the Silicon Valley (i.e., most places). Toward Entrepreneurial Community Development then offers techniques for entrepreneurial community leadership, including how to build lasting alliances, create an image, and harness the local culture for entrepreneurial advantage. The result is a book that provides the reader with the latest advancements and techniques in entrepreneurship development in a straight-forward, readable format. No matter the reader, Toward Entrepreneurial Community Development demonstrates how anyone, in any position, can lead a local entrepreneurship movement starting anywhere, anytime.

Social entrepreneurship is construed an innovative activity that addresses or mitigates social issues based on self-sufficiency and financial stability. It offers the potential to shift civil society through innovative social ventures that pursue profit and purpose. It is gaining international attention due to the intent of social entrepreneurs to change and to see the world as it can be, not as it is. These changemakers blend lessons from business with the diversity and complexity of social values and in the process pursue opportunities for change. International Perspectives on Value Creation and Sustainability Through Social Entrepreneurship explores various issues and ideas about social entrepreneurship through the lens of theoretical, practical, and empirical research. It provides an international outlook of social entrepreneurship, focusing primarily on value creation and sustainability. Covering topics such as entrepreneurship education, post-COVID perspectives, and private wealth, this premier reference source is an essential resource for entrepreneurs, business leaders, managers, government officials, policymakers, libraries, students and faculty of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

Drawing from empirical analyses, case studies, and a synthesis of best practices, this book explores how innovation manifests itself in rural places and how it contributes to entrepreneurial development and resilience. Innovation in rural places may come about as a result of new forms of collaboration; policies that leverage rural assets and address critical service or product gaps; novel strategies for accessing financial capital; infusion of arts into aspects of community life; and cultivation of networks that bridge entrepreneurs, organizations, and institutions. The chapters illustrate how a number of innovation-related characteristics relate to economic vibrancy in rural places such as a strong connection to the arts, adaptive and sustainable use of natural resources, value-chain integrated food systems, robust bridging social capital networks, creative leveraging of technology, and presence of innovation-focused entrepreneurs. Through exploration of these and other topics, this book will provide insights and best practices for rural community and economic development scholars and practitioners seeking to strengthen the rural innovation ecosystem.