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Creative entrepreneurship is a vital concept that revolves around setting up a business that is novel, thoughtful, lucrative, and yet compassionate. The global pandemic has made people realise the significance and importance of creative entrepreneurship. Self-help groups (SHGs) play a pivotal role in boosting the rural economy and empowering people. Rural creative entrepreneurship has witnessed a significant transformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The conventional concepts vanished due to the modern shift towards digitisation. Usage of the technology became the new normal and SHGs made all possible efforts to acclimatise promptly. Online virtual meetings, conference calls, and groups on WhatsApp made common people techno-savvy, facilitating work from home. The adoption of digitisation became a catalyst for the development of remote/rural areas. The present study is focused on the role of creative entrepreneurship in supporting and helping SHGs to function seamlessly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors aimed at analysing pandemic and post-pandemic creative entrepreneurship through SHGs in Himachal Pradesh (India). The authors identify that Creative Entrepreneurship initiatives have changed and supported the livelihood of rural people during the pandemic. This chapter also highlights challenges faced by the SHGs during the lockdown and their resilience strategies.

This chapter examines emerging theoretical approaches and thematic aspects of creative and cultural entrepreneurship and the significant societal and economic contributions of creative firms. It reviews the concepts and definitions essential to examining creative industry entrepreneurship. The authors then provide framing for this exceptional collection of chapters in Volume 1 (of 2) and discuss existing research approaches from surveys and small-scale qualitative studies. Then, the chapter’s overview showcases the range of international research included in three sections: conceptual reflections on creative and cultural entrepreneurship, resilience and adaptation of creative and cultural enterprises, and insights into creative subsectors. Finally, the chapter proposes a research agenda for developing the field further, addressing methodological gaps (longitudinal studies and cluster research), emerging thematics (rural creative industries and creative placemaking) and sector studies (game and film industries).

Responding to local, regional and international demands and initiatives, the government of Ecuador has rolled out an innovative program Sistema Integral de Tecnologías para la Escuela y la Comunidad (SíTEC) to place information, and communication technologies (ICTs) into the hands of students, teachers, and other educational institutions. SíTEC draws upon several elements of social entrepreneurship and has successfully reached some of the most regionally remote and culturally diverse communities in the country. The SíTEC program is emblematic of many of the criteria set forth regarding social entrepreneurship including the vision of leadership, the focus on a social mission and the importance of innovation in partnership and resource allocation. This study looks at survey and interview data from the Shiña community teachers and school leaders to determine the effects of the SíTEC program and the availability and use of ICTs in schools, SíTEC has equipped public schools with computers, projectors, digital boards, and Internet. Additionally, SíTEC organizes training courses on ICTs for public school teachers and provides schools with educational software available in Spanish, Kichwa, Shuar, and English. While there is still much work to be done, SíTEC and the associated partnerships and programs are beginning to have impact in their specified outcomes. Creative partnerships developed within the Ministry of Education, Office of Bilingual Education, Shiña community have allowed for communication and exchange of knowledge and resources across multiple partners. This chapter explores SíTEC as an innovative government-based program that meets targeted social outcomes in ICTs and education.

The objective of the work is to show the way in which creativity can influence entrepreneurial activity in Latin America. To do this, a review was made of the work related to: the mechanisms and contexts that stimulate creativity in business activities both internationally and in the region; and those that account for the contextual frameworks that favor or inhibit the development of business activity. Based on the above, it was reviewed in a more specific way, to what extent the link between creativity and entrepreneurship works or does not work in different types of companies such as small rural companies, women's businesses, and informal ones. In the last section of the chapter, with data constructed from the GEM, the impact of the context is shown to understand the geographical, historical, cultural, and institutional variations in the actions of entrepreneurship and creativity in the region, and with it, qualify the global studies on their relation.

Entrepreneurship is recognized by many as a solution to environmental and social challenges of today’s society. However, it has also been criticized since it may maintain the capitalistic demands of growth and efficiency in an unsustainable way. In this chapter, we challenge the current conception of entrepreneurship that aims for societal change by tracing what, how, where, and with whom such entrepreneurship is performed. Furthermore, we take inspiration from the idea of diverse economy by Gibson-Graham and introduce the concept of alternative entrepreneurship to explore how it takes shape, changes its contours, and both challenges and propels contemporary capitalism. In this chapter, we present three ethnographic cases of the unfolding of diverse entrepreneurial activities: (1) the case of Oria, who contributes to social justice through fair trade; (2) the case of artisan food producers who contribute to biological diversity and a rural livelihood; and (3) the case of the DiE project/NEEM NGO, which contributes to social inclusion through entrepreneurial empowerment and the development of a microcredit program. We find that the alternative entrepreneurs are not constrained by organizational forms or by a limited number of economic and non-economic activities that target societal challenges. The alternative entrepreneurs move between different organizational forms such as non-profit and for profit, as well as, undertaking business and voluntary practices to achieve societal change. Finally, we conclude that the ethnographic tracing of alternative entrepreneurship allows previously unsighted activities to become more visible and brings attention to possibilities of creatively destroying overly narrow conceptions of entrepreneurship.

The creation of small businesses in Mexico since 1990, largely the result of the diversification of activities in rural areas, is one of the most prominent strategies, both for the improvement of the quality of place and life and for value of localized resources. Although the rural context imposes barriers, social capital and networks constitute an advantage for rural entrepreneurship, since shared values and norms such as the local context allow the articulation of economic, productive, social, and cultural resources for production and sale of significant goods for the region. The cases analyzed show the value of the collective dimension for the start of productive projects, which have contributed to reconverting and sometimes reconfiguring old resources such as land, ecosystems, landscape, animals, and crafts, in assets to start a business.

Despite a large volume of theoretical and empirical research, defining the ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ within the cultural and creative sector, a sector with high heterogeneity in organisational and other aspects across its various segments remains challenging. In this regard, there should be a wide variety of differences in the characteristics and challenges of cultural entrepreneurs across industries, countries and regions. Nonetheless, the key role of the arts and cultural sector has increasingly piqued the interest of policymakers and the private sector, and it has been recognised for its importance within the South African economic landscape; as a result, the government has prioritised arts and culture as a pillar in their development strategies. Furthermore, while there has been some consensus over the past decade on what constitutes a creative industry, many questions about defining arts and cultural entrepreneurship still need to be answered, necessitating further definitional and policy coherence. As a result, some efforts at definitions are required to advance the sector and develop useful knowledge in policy formulation.

This chapter proposes an understanding of arts and cultural entrepreneurship as an exploration of a person, a community or a network's artistic resources (arts, creative and cultural) in value creation. It utilises meta-analysis, a non-empirical method, to review and analyse the existing literature. Further research is needed to investigate and evaluate the efficacy of established arts incubators, and the extent to which perceived entrepreneurial competencies affect organisational performance. Moreover, additional research is required to examine the entrepreneurial factors inhibiting or stimulating the influence on start-up financing (capital acquisition) in the South African arts and cultural industry.