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Entrepreneurship is argued to be a critical driver of economic growth for both individual communities and the nation. Regional scientists, economists, and policy makers underscore the importance of a diverse economy that supports recruitment of new firms, existing firms, and entrepreneurship efforts. However, there remains evidence that many states and localities prefer traditional industrial recruitment efforts and that local and state entrepreneurial efforts may be less coordinated. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This research explores the commitment and priorities of local and regional developers to entrepreneurial policy and other economic development policy efforts. This study uses a statewide survey to local economic developers and logistic regression to determine the likelihood of local entrepreneurial program efforts across South Carolina.

The model results reveal that the probability of local or regional entrepreneurial development programming is complex and dependent on the type of organization involved in economic development along with other community and state characteristics. However, results further confirm that barriers to entrepreneurship, like access to seed capital, and the influence of perceived alternative policies affect local and regional support of entrepreneurship.

The policy priorities of local economic developers appear to play a significant role in the probability of having local entrepreneurship policy and programs. This confirms that the signals local policymakers receive from the state may impact the programming choices and policy emphasis at the local and regional level. In conclusion, if states want entrepreneurial efforts to be a critical driver of economic growth and development, there must be a coordinated and focused state driver supporting these efforts.

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the public and private financing obstacles to medium- and small-scale entrepreneurs in rural areas in Iran.

Descriptive analytic research method is used for collecting field data among 5,770 owners of entrepreneurial businesses located in rural areas of Mashhad in 2015.

The results showed that there are numerous public and private obstacles in rural entrepreneurship financing in Iran, which are the main factors for short-term loan repayment in public sector, and in the private sector, they result in entrepreneurs’ lack of access to the source of financing. Moreover, there are a variety of financing methods for entrepreneurship in rural areas, among which personal resources and borrowings are the most important ones. Thus, lack of serious and persistent governmental support from local entrepreneurs causes many entrepreneurial failures at the early stages of entrepreneurial activity in villages of Iran.

So far, few studies have been conducted on the subject of the study; hence, the results of the current study may be helpful to the developing nations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how rural entrepreneurship engages with place and space. It explores the concept of “rural” as a socio-spatial concept in rural entrepreneurship and illustrates the importance of distinguishing between ideal types of rural entrepreneurship.

The paper uses concepts from human geography to develop two ideal types of entrepreneurship in rural areas. Ideal types constitute powerful heuristics for research and are used here to review and link existing literature on rural entrepreneurship and rural development as well as to develop new research avenues.

Two ideal types are developed: first, entrepreneurship in the rural and second, rural entrepreneurship. The former represents entrepreneurial activities with limited embeddedness enacting a profit-oriented and mobile logic of space. The latter represents entrepreneurial activities that leverage local resources to re-connect place to space. While both types contribute to local development, the latter holds the potential for an optimized use of the resources in the rural area, and these ventures are unlikely to relocate even if economic rationality would suggest it.

The conceptual distinction allows for engaging more deeply with the diversity of entrepreneurial activities in rural areas. It increases our understanding of localized entrepreneurial processes and their impact on local economic development.

This study contributes to the understanding of the localized processes of entrepreneurship and how these processes are enabled and constrained by the immediate context or “place”. The paper weaves space and place in order to show the importance of context for entrepreneurship, which responds to the recent calls for contextualizing entrepreneurship research and theories. In addition ideal types can be a useful device for further research and serve as a platform for developing rural policies.

This paper explores entrepreneurs' expectation from the new provincial government to protect sociocultural values for promoting touristic city – Pokhara, Nepal.

The purposive sampling technique was applied to source the information from the respondents resided at Pokhara. Structured questionnaire techniques and cross-sectional descriptive method were used to collect data from 393 tourism entrepreneurs to explore their understanding and existing situations.

About 85.5% of the respondents argue that the new government system has affected their business and 58.27% feel procedural complexities due to new political administrative system. Natural beauty, growing pollution, unmanaged urbanizations, good flow of the tourists and sustainability of the touristic city resulted as main aspects of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threats. The entrepreneurs expect that newly formed provincial government should provide business security, formulate appropriate tax policy and provision for business insurance scheme for smooth operation, growth and sustainability of their tourism entrepreneurship.

The research was taken in Pokhara, only the entrepreneurs mostly resided at Lakeside were taken and wider research across the whole city would give a more balanced perspective.

Recommendations are made with the aim of uplifting entrepreneurship milieu in the touristic city Pokhara in order to promote tourism business of Pokhara.

This research can help local authority to take local residents' and entrepreneurs' experience into consideration for creating better plan and policies for the well-being of Pokhara.

This is the first paper to provide data from the perspective of entrepreneurs' expectation from newly formed Gandaki provincial government in Pokhara, Nepal.

This paper aims to underscore the role of culture in situating and embedding opportunistic action differently in high- and low-entrepreneurship communities in the USA. It challenges the idea that opportunity is either exclusively discovered or created – two themes commonly found in the literature.

The approach utilizes a multiple case study across one high- and one low-entrepreneurship community in rural areas in each of three states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Maine. Community profiling, key informant interviews and survey analysis with entrepreneurs and local institutional actors are used to develop a greater understanding of how these individuals conceptualize and utilize opportunity in ways that lead to entrepreneurship development.

Quantitative and qualitative findings are presented supporting the idea that in these rural areas, discovery and creation fail to capture the nuances of how entrepreneurs think about opportunistic action.

This research offers insights for both researchers and practitioners about more effective ways to think about entrepreneurial opportunity and provides a glimpse as to how different community actors may hold different, but equally-valid, views on how opportunity arises – an idea with significant policy and practice implications.

The research contributes empirical support challenging the current discussion on entrepreneurial opportunity and advances the conversation as it pertains to rural entrepreneurship development using original research from the field.

By using the Triple Helix model, the purpose of this paper is to uncover the perceptions of nascent entrepreneurs about a university–industry–government collaboration program, in particular about the role of each agent to foster rural entrepreneurship; the value and effect of this collaboration; and their own contributions to local development.

A qualitative case study method is adopted, involving semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and secondary data. The text is analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The interaction of the Triple Helix partners is perceived as valuable both at the personal and the business levels. One of the most salient results is the value ascribed to the knowledge-rich environment created. Entrepreneurs are aware of their contribution to local development, identifying economic, social and cultural effects.

The research strengthens the importance of the joint efforts of the Triple Helix partners by uncovering a number of outputs from their collaboration, which affect both the entrepreneurs and local development through entrepreneurship.

Previous studies assume that the Triple Helix fosters technological innovation that favors regional development, mainly by adopting a macro-level perspective. This study makes a contribution by furthering the knowledge on the micro-level dynamics of the Triple Helix, through the view of low tech, rural entrepreneurs, considering their context.

Socio‐economic decline in rural areas is a pervasive and debilitating phenomenon in terms of regional development, particularly when former models of economic growth which once stimulated business generation and regeneration can no longer be counted on to do so. In these austere times, models of social and community enterprise are becoming more important. This corresponds to the emergence of theories of community‐based entrepreneurship and social enterprise as explanatory variables. Such theories are used to label enterprising behaviour enacted within our communities, even when the theoretical arguments underpinning these re‐conceptualisations require to be stretched to permit this. Often the resultant explanations are not entirely convincing. The purpose of this paper is to challenge existing conceptualisations of community‐based entrepreneurship and social enterprise.

Using a case study methodology, the paper reports on the activities of the Buchan Development Partnership (BDP) – a community‐based project situated in the Buchan area of Aberdeenshire, Scotland – demonstrating how individual and community enterprise can be utilized to develop enterprising individuals and communities by growing enterprises organically. The case articulates this process, as it occurred in a rural development partnership using a narrative‐based case study methodology to examine activities and growth strategies.

The case bridges issues of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial process, community and regional development and tells a story of community regeneration through the process of “Community Animateurship”.

Research, practical and social implications are discussed but in particular the need to adopt a more holistic “bottom up” approach.

This case challenges existing conceptualisations of community‐based entrepreneurship and social enterprise.

Investigates an example of group entreprenuership as found in a project promoting social and economic regeneration in economically fragile communities in north east Scotland. Encouraging entrepreneurship in community groups is the basis of the Villages in Control (ViC) project introduced in north east Scotland in 1993. ViC was a joint initiative between the local authorities of the region and the Local Enterprise Company (LEC) and was aimed at encouraging rural and coastal communities to diversify away from existing economic patterns. The objective of ViC was to encourage entrepreneurial activity at community level through a process which involved a group of individuals from each village developing and implementing a strategic plan for the economic regeneration of their own community. Using one community as an example, the paper discusses the experiences and impact of ViC and illustrates the entrepreneurial ventures generated by the community group. The paper emphasizes the importance of co‐ordinating community members into a recognisable group in order to produce the community strategic document, and also for the ideas for economic regeneration to come from the group itself. The discussion concludes that developing community entrepreneurship requires a supportive infra‐structure and a long term commitment of people and resources to facilitate the process of releasing the entrepreneurial spirit of each individual community.