For rural regions, growing local entrepreneurship is a promising pathway to prosperity. For entrepreneurship to thrive, however, it requires an enabling environment – a strong “entrepreneurial ecosystem”. In recent years researchers have started to study entrepreneurial ecosystem to understand what makes entrepreneurship flourish in particular places. Our study focused on entrepreneurial ecosystem in a rural region and worked with a traditionally under-represented entrepreneurial group: rural women. Very little research on entrepreneurial ecosystem has been conducted in rural settings, or from women’s perspectives. Our research started from the observation that women are underrepresented as business owners and thus arguably an untapped source of entrepreneurship in rural regions.
Working in rural North West Tasmania, we designed a research project to answer the question, “What is required to create an inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem for rural women entrepreneurs?” Our project was solution-oriented, designed to understand and address a practical issue. Using participatory action research we worked directly with rural women entrepreneurs to learn from their experiences and find ways to improve the local entrepreneurial ecosystem in a rural region.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems in Rural Places
Entrepreneurial ecosystems are the environments that support entrepreneurship. Spiegel (2017), for instance, has defined entrepreneurial ecosystem as a combination of social, political, economic, and cultural elements inside an environment that enable business ventures to emerge and grow. Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems gives us insights about how local contexts may support (or discourage) entrepreneurship.
Current research on entrepreneurial ecosystems has focused almost exclusively on high-performing urban settings, with very little research on the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems in rural places. Several authors have challenged researchers to explore entrepreneurial ecosystems in rural contexts, as well as to consider how women experience entrepreneurial ecosystem. Our study aimed to understand what the entrepreneurial ecosystem in rural North West Tasmania looked like from the perspectives of entrepreneurial women.
Using Participatory Action Research
Our project used participatory action research (PAR) which actively involved participants in the process of understanding problems and identifying solutions. Using PAR, we engaged women entrepreneurs directly in solution-oriented research.
The research employed a program of three in-depth participatory assessment workshops and two co-design workshops with entrepreneurial women in North West Tasmania. A total of 64 women from North West Tasmania participated. Participants assessed the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region, focusing both on strengths (‘what we have”) and gaps (“what we need”), and then designed and implemented solutions.
Results of the Study
Our findings demonstrated how women’s experiences of their regional entrepreneurial ecosystem were conditioned by the rural socio-cultural context and their gendered roles within it and enabled them to develop concrete actions in response. It also shows how it is possible to work with entrepreneurs to improve local environments for entrepreneurship.
Improving the Environment for Rural Women’s Entrepreneurship
Participants identified the resources available to support entrepreneurship in their region as well as some important gaps: for instance, in skill-development opportunities, access to finance, information, and affordable service providers. Further, female entrepreneurs identified that they felt isolated and had few sources of encouragement or peer support.
In assessing their ecosystem, women entrepreneurs in North West Tasmania described a socio-cultural environment in which traditional gender roles and attitudes prevailed. Caring and household responsibilities still largely fell on women, and there were few visible role models of other successful women in business. As a result, women entrepreneurs often felt isolated, lacked confidence, and tended to under-sell themselves and their work. These findings highlighted the importance of socio-cultural factors in entrepreneurial ecosystem; women experienced the regional environment for entrepreneurship differently than men.
Participants identified what was largely missing from their ecosystem included peer support and guidance from other women entrepreneurs. They preferred relational learning, via in-depth conversations and exchange with other experienced entrepreneurs, rather than the more common transactional structure of training. To begin to fill this gap, participants formed their own peer support group of women entrepreneurs: Ignite North West Women. This group continued to develop over the following years to provide ongoing peer support for women entrepreneurs in the region.
Next Steps for Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Practice
Our findings have important practical implications for improving entrepreneurship in rural regions. Using PAR, we actively engaged local entrepreneurs in defining problems and solutions, catalyzing a direct impact. Focusing on a particular group of rural women entrepreneurs, we demonstrated how gender and social position matter: the entrepreneurial ecosystem looks different depending on who you are.
Practitioners seeking to grow entrepreneurship in local places could productively use PAR to work with other diverse and under-represented entrepreneurial populations, such as entrepreneurs living with a disability, senior entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs from minority groups, to understand their experiences of local ecosystems and identify how to create more inclusive entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Read the full article here
Authors
Naomi Birdthistle, Professor at the Department of Business Strategy and Innovation Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, 4222, Australia https://experts.griffith.edu.au/21532-naomi-birdthistle
Robyn Eversole, Howard I. Scott Professor of Practice in Social Entrepreneurship, Freeman College of Management, Bucknell University, One Dent Dr., Lewisburg, PA 17837, United States
Megerssa Walo, Melbourne, VIC, 3978, Australia
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