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Leveraging the boom of a craft beer renaissance, this paper explores social capital theory through the impact of the craft brewing industry. The exploration addresses entrepreneurial micro-ecosystems that share one commonality – the need for community development and revitalization. North Carolina's deregulation of craft brewing (Pop-the-Cap Initiative, 2005) led to a boom of brewery startups, from 54 in 2010 to more than 380 in 2022.

This qualitative study focuses on 15 brewery founders who have launched ventures within a few years of the Pop-the-Cap Initiative. This included 15% of those breweries launched between 2012 and 2017. Naturalistic Inquiry methodology was utilized, and semi-structured interviews, observations, and artifact analyses were applied to each participant via content analysis and NVivo.

Framed by two contributing entrepreneurial mindset factors (anti-establishment mindset and business-person's burden mindset) and three external entrepreneurial micro-ecosystems conditions (community conditions, doom and boom conditions, and economic conditions), these emergent themes represent the ecosystem contributors (mindsets/conditions) associated with startup success and social value creation in rural and downtrodden urban areas.

This study facilitated a deep dive into two evolving entrepreneurial micro-ecosystems (rural/urban) through the perspective of brewery startups. It illuminated the actors, conditions, and domains in play. Conceptualizations of “nestedness” (Spigel, 2022) with “microfoundations” (Wurth et al., 2022) integrated to see a specific sector (craft brewing) developing within a sub-ecosystem's capacity to help frame and “understand the co-evolution of agents with entrepreneurial ecosystems” (Cho et al., 2022). Additionally, antecedents to the birth of local economies suggest the value of agents involved in evolution of nascent local economies (Cho et al., 2022). These findings reinforce developing literature while presenting opportunities for future studies.

Craft breweries in rural and urban environments represent third places within communities. Third places can be recognized as conduits for developing social capital among individuals, groups, and firms. High levels of social capital positively impact communities. These conditions helped anchor tenants thrive and did not occur accidently. They are intentional value propositions of entrepreneurs and ecosystem conditions.

Brewery entrepreneurs were aware of their contribution to social capital value, economic impact (e.g., tax revenue, jobs, space, attraction/destination, etc.), and how these facets interplay as revitalizing anchor tenants (i.e., craft breweries). Insight into how entrepreneurs come to understand and recognize their impact on community through social capital development and the economy can aid in further support ecosystems at the community level.

The main goal of this work is to argue the theoretical validity of two competitive models that integrate entrepreneurial alertness in the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and also to propose an explanation for the conceptual approach with a higher explicative ability.

A total of 281 undergraduate students participated in the survey, and the data were analyzed using structural equation modeling and competitive models.

The research shows it is possible to defend and test two competing TPB models with entrepreneurial alertness (EA), which alerts other field researchers to consider more than one possibility. The model showing the impact EA has on attitude toward the behavior (ATB) and perceived behavioral control (PBC), as well as the model showing the impact of ATB and PBC on EA are both valid. The shared characteristic of the sample may explain a higher predictive power in the first model.

The sample was limited to undergraduate students of one university.

For educators and policymakers, these results highlight the need to include content related to EA in entrepreneurship education programs since it could trigger the entrepreneurial process.

The paper is the first of its kind to demonstrate competing arguments for the role of EA in TPB.

The entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) literature is dominated by conceptual studies with insufficient theoretical foundations and empirical evidence on the micro-level. This study aims to explore the largely overlooked question of what the drivers that motivate small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to participate in an ecosystem are.

The study adopts a qualitative exploratory approach. The empirical data consists of 19 semi-structured interviews with top management of SMEs in the health tech ecosystem in Finland. The data were analyzed using a thematic content analysis.

This study reveals a typology of drivers that motivate SMEs to participate in an ecosystem. These include social drivers (networking and cooperation and communication and knowledge sharing), resource drivers (access to resources, formal and informal support and market access) and cognitive drivers (shared goals and common values).

The study contributes to the EE research by highlighting the drivers that motivate health tech SMEs to become members of the local ecosystem. It suggests that managers and entrepreneurs need to be aware of the factors related to social, resource and cognitive drivers to ensure the future success of their business.

The study draws evidence from a micro-level perspective which enriches the understanding of the EE phenomenon. It also explores an increasingly relevant but under-researched field, the health tech ecosystem.

Bike-sharing is popular worldwide, and it has led to a new development direction in green transportation. However, the collapse of many bike-sharing startups and residual social problems has brought about contradictions and challenges to the development of the industry. The purpose of this paper is to determine how internal factors affect the survival of bike-sharing startups.

The authors used binary logit regression as the measurement model to conduct an empirical analysis based on 137 bike-sharing startups in China. The study focuses on using traditional theoretical evidence and considers the uniqueness of the industry to jointly explore the survival factors that influence the emerging business model of bike-sharing.

The results show that entrepreneurial team size and differentiation strategy positively influence survival. Founder-CEOs have a negative impact on survival. Founders' entrepreneurial experience and venture capital have no significant influence on survival.

The results verify the role of traditional survival factors in the new business model of sharing economy and fill the research gap on the survival strategy of startups. This study offers a unique perspective for researchers to better understand the sharing economy industry and provides practical guidance for entrepreneurs and investors to enter the market.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive vision of the formation of intra-metropolitan clusters triggered by the deindustrialization of an urban area, namely, the district of Porto Marghera in the metropolitan area of Venice and propose possible regeneration scenarios based on intra-metropolitan clustering.

This paper adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and relies on both descriptive and qualitative evidence to show the economic transition occurred in the area of Porto Marghera in recent years.

Evidence shows the rise of two potential clusters in the KIBS and the creative industries in a well-delimited fringe area placed at the boundary between the urban centre and the core of the deindustrialized zone. Such clustering processes have been, however, characterized by two different and in some way alternative paths. The former stems from the combination of two autonomous entrepreneurial ideas that complemented one to each other. The latter relies on university-industry collaboration and on the presence of places of informal exchanges that proved to support personal networking, knowledge exchange and business opportunities.

This paper suggests that local development policies could leverage on the presence of social entrepreneurs to substitute the creation of amenities and the provision of public goods in fragile territories.

This paper shows that, in presence of specific spatial conditions, deindustrialization can stimulate the formation of new intra-metropolitan through both top-down and bottom-up agglomeration process.

This paper aims to propose a framework of transformative strategies across the different levels of the service ecosystem for the recovery, well-being and inclusion of Latin American small service firms in the new service marketplace.

The viewpoint presents an overview of the transformative strategies that can be developed by ecosystem actors for Latin American small service firms in the new marketplace, due to the pandemic crisis. The data are based on personal research and secondary industry reports.

The pandemic crisis has had an unpresented effect on the service industry in Latin America, particularly on small service firms, which are largely informal. This viewpoint provides themes for timely and actionable transformative strategies for the service industry ecosystem in this region and proposes research avenues for service scholars.

This viewpoint provides implications and ideas for future research on transformative actions for a new services marketplace in Latin America.

This viewpoint the first to propose transformative ecosystem strategies for recovery, well-being and inclusion of small service firms in the new service marketplace in Latin America.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the honeybee colony metaphor as a tool to make sense of the dynamics of service systems surrounding a service relationship.

Based on qualitative case research, this study develops and applies the metaphor of honeybee colonies as a tool to analytically and discursively draw parallels between different aspects of honeybees and service systems surrounding a service relationship, focusing on the dynamic nature of both.

The honeybee colony metaphor can serve as an analytical tool, helping managers to make sense of the dynamics of service interactions and, as a discursive tool, giving sense to the strategic implications of service providers’ everyday activities.

Few metaphors, no matter how complex, can wholly capture reality. The honeybee colony metaphor describes the dynamics surrounding a service relationship at a comprehensive level. Further research can focus on the metaphor’s particular aspects (the changing role of honeybees in the system, for example) or distortions (e.g. parasitic relationships).

The honeybee colony metaphor illustrates the strategic importance of part-time marketers; they “pollinate” and “fertilize” the customers and properly assessed information that they report represents a basis for strategic decisions.

The introduction of the honeybee colony metaphor in this paper provides a new lens for capturing the dynamic aspects of service systems surrounding a service relationship and the strategic implications derived from adopting a systemic outlook on service.