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Microentrepreneurship is emerging as a key area of tourism research due to its increasing visibility and economic significance. Microentrepreneurs have complex pecuniary and non-pecuniary motivations, they combine multiple forms of knowledge to achieve success, and they can generate circularity and competitiveness when integrated into formal destination systems. Continued research on this topic is needed, but careful consideration of the ethics and methods used is recommended. This chapter assembles findings in this volume and in the tourism literature to propose a roadmap for principled engagement with microentrepreneurs.

This study aims to analyze the effects of microentrepreneurs’ knowledge transfer (KT) on personal improvement (PI) and business improvement (BI).

The study was developed in two stages: a literature review based on KT and the learning process in microenterprises to have managerial competence and PI and BI to acquire the managerial competence that entrepreneurs need. The second stage was constructing a structural model based on 107 questionnaires and bootstrapping of 5,000 replications of microentrepreneurs who went through a training program (quantitative) and a focus group (qualitative). This study had a mixed approach, exploratory scope and experimental design.

The research showed real evidence about the performance level of microentrepreneurs when they passed through the process of KT and its impact on PI and BI. This research considers their managerial competencies, and the findings show a relationship between the theory of individual and organizational learning.

This study considered Peruvian microentrepreneurs who participated in a virtual training program that included several courses related to their current environments and topics of interest. The analyzed period covered the years affected by COVID-19.

The model reveals that KT is relevant to PI and BI. Performance was measured regarding growth, income, innovation, productivity and responsibility before and after the program.

This research analyzed the need for training microentrepreneurs for personal and private reasons under a COVID-19 scenario to foster their businesses and assume financial responsibilities. This study considered Peru’s reality, a country in which 94.9% of companies are microenterprises. The study revealed that microentrepreneurs improved their personal and professional lives and addressed relevant social problems that affect their environments because of the KT effects.

This study bridges the gap in the literature on how the theory of KT can be applied to entrepreneurs. This study revealed significant findings in terms of PI and BIs. The impact of KT indicates the relevance of managerial competencies related to the performance level obtained in terms of growth, income, innovation, productivity and responsibility.

Rural subaltern people are generally relegated to the role of passive tourees, allowed to informally glean bits of income not worthwhile to the formal tourism industry. However, under some circumstances, microentrepreneurs find ways to take advantage of opportunities afforded by tourism to improve their livelihoods and gain human agency. The People-First Tourism Lab employs a participatory action research methodology to investigate tourism microentrepreneurship and its effect on participating individuals and communities. In this chapter, the authors provide a background of the project implemented in the State of North Carolina, USA, explain the research methodology, and outline current and forthcoming efforts.

Microentrepreneurs have played a role in the tourism industry for a long time; however, they are now becoming more visible and increasingly influential stakeholders due to information technologies that enable them to reach prospective visitors, and because their economic activity is more transparent and taxable by governments. Nevertheless, tourism microentrepreneurship is still understudied, and destination practitioners are largely unprepared to fuel microentrepreneurial development and to integrate these genuine, local experiences with the formal sector components of the industry. This chapter provides an introductory overview of related knowledge as a basis for identification of themes in research on tourism microentrepreneurship.

Cruise ships visiting Belize is a recent and fast-growing aspect of the nation's largest economic sector, tourism. Many Belizean businesses are very small and informal; potential access to cruise ship visitors provides an opportunity for growth and income stability. We investigate the challenges and opportunities informal microenterprises face in the cruise tourism marketplace through qualitative interviews at three popular tourist destinations: Xunantunich (Maya ruins), Community Baboon Sanctuary (Howler Monkeys), and Jaguar Paw (cave river tubing). The results indicate that despite robust growth in cruise tourism, local microentrepreneurs are currently disenfranchised, receiving few economic benefits from the cruise trade. We propose several recommendations to allow Belizean microentrepreneurs and the local economy to capture more economic benefits.

The neo-endogenous approach to rural development puts great importance on territorialization, and aligns with place-based strategies and with microentrepreneurship because both concepts consider local specificities and leveraging local resources. This chapter analyzes characteristics of rural tourism establishments in Vojvodina, Northern Province of Serbia, of which the majority are microenterprises. The discussion focuses on aspects of microenterprise functioning such as human capital, offers, revenues, and non-material benefits. The aim is to analyze the local embeddedness of rural tourism microenterprises and their contribution to neo-endogenous rural development. Our results reveal that microentrepreneurs are embedded in rural places, but they face numerous constraints which in turn limits the benefits host communities might receive from place-based rural tourism development.

Prior research documents that host communities struggle to influence tourism product design and destination management; however, emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) are allowing host communities to bypass retail monopolies and create self-representation. This chapter examines how to make technological innovation endogenous to a regional growth model by identifying barriers constraining the adoption of innovation among rural microentrepreneurs in Pennsylvania. Insights about adoption of ICTs were gathered through participatory action engagement and semi-structured interviews with a network of rural tourism microentrepreneurs. Analysis revealed that microentrepreneurs perceive that tracking and monitoring customer inquiries is very time consuming, and they feel that using these platforms diverts them from achieving their desired lifestyles.

When researching the role of microentrepreneurship in equitable and sustainable development, the question of how tourism microentrepreneurs forge relationships between place, community, and resources is significant. Two case studies from CREATOUR, a project investigating creative tourism, a novel type of cultural tourism that includes active participation in creative activities and connection to place, examines how these relationships are developed and implemented. Findings indicate that creative tourism microentrepreneurial activities in two small cities are being shaped by, and shaping, place in multifaceted ways. Creative tourism activities stimulate new perspectives on place, are designed synergistically with the “seasonal” fluctuations of the type of visitors, are embedded in personal networks of collaborators, and actively encourage alternative patterns of tourism consumption.

With a population of over 150¹ million, Bangladesh provides a large consumer market for potential industries. Moreover, it holds one of the lowest wage structures in the world. The comparative advantage of Bangladesh lies primarily in its agro-processing industries. But besides agriculture, the rural-based microenterprise (MEs) sector in Bangladesh is a potentially lucrative field of investment (IPPF, 2001). In spite of its major contributions toward economic development, the rural-based microentrepreneurs in Bangladesh suffer from lack in working capital, institutional credit facilities, and poor management. There are many formal and informal financing organizations that are functioning in the money market of Bangladesh. Formal financing institutions like government and privately owned commercial banks normally give loans to large- and medium-scale industries (Alam, 2009). Cooperative banks in the country, although giving loans to the rural-based microenterprises, confine their credit giving activities mainly to the members of the bank (BIDS, 1981, 1988, 1989, 1990). One of the specialized and well-known microcredit giving organizations in Bangladesh called “Grameen Bank” (Yunus, 1993; Nabi, 1990) also gives microcredit to the rural-based microentrepreneurs, especially to the rural poor women. Besides many NGOs, moneylenders in rural Bangladesh are also an important source of lending funds to the rural-based microentrepreneurs.

Advances in information and communication technology have revolutionized the tourism industry. This development has blurred geographical boundaries, facilitated low transaction costs by directly connecting travelers to hosts and service providers, and improved service quality and distribution. The tourism industry, however, is in the midst of another massive change. The emergence of sharing economy platforms, such as Airbnb and Uber, is disrupting business models and is providing opportunities for microentrepreneurship. The goal of this chapter is to study how the changing nature of tourism business models and the increasing importance of microentrepreneurship are impacting value creation, capture, and delivery in tourism.