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This paper aims to focus on the role of the community entrepreneur and the process of community entrepreneurship. It seeks to emphasize the social context as critical for gaining access to the resources needed by a community venture and elaborates on the action pattern of the community entrepreneur towards raising critical resources from the environment.

The analysis is based on a longitudinal field study of community entrepreneurs in four Norwegian rural municipalities. The data consists of interviews, observations, and documents.

Community entrepreneurs create local arenas and thereby facilitate cooperative entrepreneurial action, through bridging social capital. The actors are part of these community contexts and are involved in a range of reciprocal relations. Thus, the actors' creative practices toward the community have to run parallel with the resource configuration process.

Future studies may provide a broader empirical platform in different communities, and take part in the process for a longer time period. One may also develop comparative studies focusing on the basic resource platform, the action pattern, and the performance of the different social ventures.

A major finding is that government support should be flexible and develop tools “tailored” to the characteristics of the rural communities. The combined resources of the entrepreneurs, social networks, and more formal institutions create more ambitious results.

The paper contributes to the field of entrepreneurship by studying community entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial ventures. Further, an integration of a resource configuration approach and a practice‐oriented approach gives an increased understanding to the community venture creation process.

Employees are considered as important contributors to service innovation, but the literature is not unanimous about what employee involvement in service innovation entails. To advance theoretical understanding of the topic, this paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing employee involvement in service innovations, reviews existing research on the topic and proposes a research agenda.

Different modes of employee involvement in service innovation are distinguished based on two dimensions: (1) the intensity of employee influence on service innovation and (2) the breadth of the innovation activity in which employees are involved. This conceptual framework is abductively developed through a literature review of empirical service innovation studies to identify and analyse whether and how these modes of employee involvement are manifested in the service innovation literature.

The findings delineate six modes of employee involvement in the reviewed service innovation studies. Employees are primarily seen as having a strong influence on situated innovation activities but a limited influence on systemic innovation activities. The findings show that more research is needed to assess the connections between different modes of employee involvement.

The findings can be used by practitioners to assess the possibilities different modes of employee involvement may bring to service innovation activities.

The proposed conceptual framework and the analysis of current research and research gaps in service innovation studies provide a clear research agenda for progressing multidimensional understanding of employee involvement in service innovation.