Author
Sarah Jack
Entrepreneurship and Strategy Department, Lancaster University Management School
Biography
Sarah Jack is Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at Lancaster University Management School, United Kingdom. She is also an affiliated researcher with the House of Innovation and Misum, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden, and Audencia Business School, Nantes, France. Her research focuses on the social dimensions of entrepreneurship, particularly social networks and social capital, explored through qualitative methodologies. She is an editor of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and associate editor of Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. She has also published widely in leading academic journals. Sarah also held a 5-year leadership role at the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management.
The Silicon Valley model positions entrepreneurship as high growth, high value, disruptive, technologically driven, opportunity seeking, and venture capital backed.[i] It has shaped policy thinking across the globe, encouraging governments to pursue and support the gazelles and unicorns of entrepreneurship. Increasingly, critiques of this view of entrepreneurship are becoming prominent. In particular, there is a growing recognition of the social value of entrepreneurship, supporting the notion that the everyday entrepreneurs and communities they work with warrant greater support and investment.
In 2019, Audretsch identified four major issues with this model of entrepreneurship: (1) the model focuses disproportionately on outliers and exceptional cases; (2) it marginalizes the far more common forms of entrepreneurship, such as self-employment, small business ownership, and family business; (3) it overlooks substantial empirical evidence demonstrating the economic importance of more diverse forms of start-ups; and (4) it has biased policy toward entrepreneurship that conforms to the Silicon Valley template.[ii] Audretsch’s critique thus underscores the social value of entrepreneurship and suggests the need to redirect attention and support toward the majority of entrepreneurs, who are not the Silicon Valley type, and the work they undertake in their everyday lives.
This shift in focus also raises vital questions about identity, cultural expectations, and inequality, including what it means to enact entrepreneurial roles within ordinary, lived situations and why attending to these experiences is essential for fully understanding entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is often positioned as a key driver of economic growth, employment, and prosperity. Although these economic outcomes are attractive to governments and policymakers, entrepreneurial activity ultimately depends on individuals’ ability to access relevant resources and creatively (re)combine them to generate change. This underscores the importance of understanding not only the economic potential of entrepreneurship but also the everyday capacities, constraints, and lived realities of entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship is a form of change, but the types of change it produces vary widely across contexts. Context affects both the available opportunities and the ways in which entrepreneurial activity is practiced. Thus, entrepreneurial processes are deeply embedded in social, cultural, and spatial environments and cannot be understood apart from these influences.
Inequality, identity, and cultural norms also shape entrepreneurship. Although dominant perspectives have historically centered on the Global North, conversations are increasingly turning toward the Global South. This shift is critical, reflecting recognition that there are many ways to “do” entrepreneurship, to innovate, and to enact entrepreneurial practice. Recognizing these diverse expressions of entrepreneurship allows us to deepen our understanding of its global practice and positions us to develop the support and policy mechanisms that are genuinely needed in different contexts.
Entrepreneurship and context
In many contexts, entrepreneurship arises out of necessity rather than from recognizing opportunity. It may serve as a means of survival or reflect the absence of viable alternatives. Consequently, entrepreneurship can take on distinctly different forms across settings. New businesses may be created by entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurial activity does not occur in a vacuum; it is profoundly shaped by place, community dynamics, and social relationships that enable or constrain individuals’ ability to act entrepreneurially, establish new ventures, and create value. These dimensions of entrepreneurship should not be overlooked.
The role of community in entrepreneurship is critical, yet this relationship remains insufficiently understood. Community and society provide essential structures within which entrepreneurship takes place, yet communities can both include and exclude individuals. For example, fear of failure and how failure might be judged within the community can have devastating consequences for an entrepreneur and their family. Entrepreneurship can also replicate or deepen existing social problems rather than contributing to a more secure or thriving society. Understanding entrepreneurship not simply as an individual act but one taking place in, through, and with communities is therefore vital. This view inherently takes into account community connectedness, which helps explain how factors such as racial integration, community cohesion, and social ties across ethnic groups shape entrepreneurial activity.[iii] Such entrepreneurship can recreate, renew, and reify purposeful identities for places and their futures, grounded in meaningful and context-sensitive opportunities that align with local needs, resources, and capabilities.[iv]
Institutions also influence economic processes and, thus, entrepreneurial activity. Too often, we assume institutional stability, yet such conditions are rarely present in transitional settings – where institutions are undergoing significant change – or in peripheral contexts that lie outside the core of economic and political power.[v] Each country has its own institutional dynamics shaped by history, politics, and culture; thus, no two environments are alike. What we do understand is that stable institutions tend to be more supportive of entrepreneurship, whereas unstable institutional environments can pose challenges for entrepreneurs. Yet familiarity with the local context and its institutional logics and constraints can enable entrepreneurs to navigate these challenges more effectively.
The engaged university as an institution of entrepreneurship
Universities represent a distinctive institutional form. The shift in university “third mission” or “engagement” agendas toward social and sustainability objectives aligns with what scholars describe as the engaged university.[vi] Such universities balance social and economic goals not only by facilitating knowledge transfer across sectors but also by working directly with local stakeholders.[vii] Through these partnerships, universities help build trust and social capital, strengthen interpersonal relationships, and contribute to addressing locally defined challenges. They also create both social and economic value and support the development of innovation ecosystems that generate wider societal benefits.
The engaged university concept is also increasingly central to framing universities’ roles in sustainability and regional development, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals, often through engagement in social innovation.[viii] Social innovation can involve the creation of new institutional environments (e.g., formal and informal rules), new spatial and procedural arrangements, new relationships and networks (e.g., collaborations, values, skills, practices, and learning processes), and new fields of activity such as social entrepreneurship and social enterprise.[ix]
How might the engaged university work alongside entrepreneurs and communities to generate sustainable and inclusive societal impact? The answer lies in recognizing that many effective solutions emerge from the bottom up, through community-led action. Examples of such grassroots innovation include solar cooking devices, new methods for cooking and cultivating rice under conditions of severe water scarcity, improved promotion and distribution of menstrual health products, and regenerative agricultural practices. These innovations are grounded in lived experience, real-world constraints, and the deep local knowledge of entrepreneurs who understand the issues firsthand and are motivated to act for societal benefit. Yet many community-rooted models remain overlooked or undersupported because they do not align with traditional investor expectations or with the assumptions embedded in the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship. With their focus on sustainability and regional development, engaged universities can play a critical role in recognizing, supporting, and scaling community-rooted innovations, thereby contributing to the uplifting of places.
Community-centered entrepreneurship offers a powerful alternative frame centered on reciprocity, stewardship, long-term societal well-being, and the creation of shared value rather than the extraction and rapid scaling of economic value. In this context, the engaged university can work alongside communities to support, legitimize, and elevate diverse forms of innovation that meaningfully address local needs. Three university engagement activities I have been engaged with where this has happened are the Smart Village Movement, an initiative led by UC Berkely’s Gatewood Centre for Corporate Innovation; RECIRCULATE, an initiative led by Lancaster University, UK; and SIMRA, an initiative led by The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, UK.
The Smart Village Movement in rural India illustrates how the engaged university working in partnership with diverse stakeholders can contribute to meaningful, locally grounded innovation.[x] The initiative seeks to transform rural development through collaborative problem-solving, bringing together government, industry, academic institutions, and community actors to coinnovate solutions to local challenges. Its mission is “to contribute to the enhancement of the overall well-being of rural communities, fostering resilience, independence, and prosperity while bridging the rural–urban divide”; this statement captures the essence of bottom-up, community-led innovation supported by global networks.
The EU Horizon 2020 project SIMRA examined social innovation and governance in marginalized and rural areas across agriculture, forestry, and rural development.[xi] Through an extensive program of case studies, SIMRA identified the triggers, drivers, development patterns, success factors, and evaluation criteria associated with rural social innovation. It also produced a publicly accessible database of community-led initiatives. SIMRA showed that building social capital, reshaping local social practices, and providing enabling policy frameworks can generate significant societal benefits. It further revealed opportunities to better recognize and support the scale and scope of social innovation emerging from rural communities.
RECIRCULATE was a £7-million transdisciplinary project led by Lancaster University and funded by the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund.[xii] RECIRCULATE aimed to build robust and equitable partnerships between UK and African researchers and a broad range of stakeholders, including policymakers, entrepreneurs, government bodies, managers, and students. Centered on ecoinnovation and the development of a safe circular water economy, the project deliberately embedded a workstream on entrepreneurship, innovation, and stakeholder engagement to identify the optimal ecosystem for African research institutions to work with, in, and for their communities. RECIRCULATE demonstrates how strengthening institutional capacity, partnership practices, and engagement processes at the local level can contribute to more sustainable and context-appropriate innovation ecosystems. In Africa, female entrepreneurship is expanding. George et al. (2016) observed that women who head households are especially likely to start new businesses during periods of social disruption or institutional breakdown.[xiii] Accordingly, policymakers in Africa should prioritize support for women by strengthening access to advice, resources, and networks, thereby creating a more enabling and equitable environment in which women are better positioned and supported to pursue entrepreneurial activity.
Taken together, these examples demonstrate how engaged universities can act as critical partners in enabling, legitimizing, and amplifying locally grounded entrepreneurial innovation that advances inclusive and sustainable development.
Conclusion and Policy Implications
The social benefits of entrepreneurship across different contexts remain insufficiently understood. Consider, for instance, the family business that continues to employ workers during economic downturns not because doing so maximizes profit but because the social and economic consequences of job loss would be severe for local households. Such relational, community-centered decisions illustrate forms of value creation that fall outside conventional economic measures yet are fundamental to social stability and collective well-being. Moving forward, policy frameworks could be designed to offer broader evaluation criteria beyond firm growth and profitability to include social stability, community resilience, and place-based value creation. There is also a persistent funding gap, namely the limited availability of appropriate finance at the community level. Expanding financial support tailored to locally embedded ventures could yield significant benefits, but it also raises complex questions about governance, accountability, and the design of financial mechanisms that genuinely meet community needs rather than reproduce existing inequities. Entrepreneurial success is often shaped less by individual ambition or talent and more by access to capital, networks, and supportive institutions. This reinforces a growing call for more inclusive forms of entrepreneurship and innovation—approaches that work with communities to address their needs and that bring diverse stakeholders together to build shared value. Understanding entrepreneurship as fundamentally embedded in place and community helps reveal how new entrepreneurial possibilities can emerge from local knowledge, relationships, and capabilities. When social purpose is meaningfully aligned with economic outcomes, the effects can be transformative: community well-being strengthens, local identities are renewed, and new opportunities begin to take shape. Entrepreneurship policy could even be designed as a cocreative process, with communities involved from agenda-setting through to implementation and evaluation. Achieving such outcomes, however, requires a substantial shift—from top-down interventions toward approaches that empower communities, value their expertise, and position them as cocreators rather than passive recipients of externally designed solutions.
[i] Howard E. Aldrich and Martin Ruef, “Unicorns, Gazelles, and Other Distractions on the Way to Understanding Real Entrepreneurship in the United States,” Academy of Management Perspectives 32, no. 4 (2018): 458-472, https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2017.0123; Friederike Welter et al., “Three Waves and Counting: The Rising Tide of Contextualization in Entrepreneurship Research,” Small Business Economics 52, no. 2 (2019): 319-330, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-018-0094-5.
[ii] David B. Audretsch, “Have We Oversold the Silicon Valley Model of Entrepreneurship?” Small Business Economics 56, no. 2 (2021): 849-856, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00272-4.
[iii] Sampsa Samila and Olav Sorenson, “Community and Capital in Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 4 (2017): 770–795, https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122417711699.
[iv] Edward McKeever et al., “Embedded Entrepreneurship in the Creative Re-construction of Place,” Journal of Business Venturing 30, no. 1 (2015): 50-65, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2014.07.002.
[v] David Smallbone and Friederike Welter, “Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change in Transition Economies: The Commonwealth of Independent States, Central and Eastern Europe and China Compared,” Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 24, no. 3–4 (2012): 215–233, https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2012.670914.
[vi] Shiri M. Breznitz and Maryann P. Feldman, “The Engaged University,” The Journal of Technology Transfer 37, no. 2 (2012): 139–157, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-010-9183-6.
7 E. Thomas et al., Beyond ambidexterity: Universities and their changing roles in driving regional development in challenging times, The Journal of Technology Transfer, 48 no. 6 (2023): 2054–2073, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-022-09992-4
[viii] M. Kathleen Burke et al., “The Engaged University Delivering Social Innovation,” The Journal of Technology Transfer 49, no. 6 (2024): 2056–2079., https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-024-10091-9.
[ix] Social Innovation in Marginalized Rural Areas (SIMRA), “Home,” accessed November 2025, http://www.simra-h2020.eu/.
[x] Smart Village Movement, “Home,” accessed January 2, 2026, https://www.smartvillagemovement.org/.
[xi] SIMRA, “Home,” Accessed Feburary 9, 2026, http://www.simra-h2020.eu/.
[xii] RECIRCULATE, “Home,” accessed January 2, 2026, https://recirculate.global/.
[xiii] Gerard George et al., “Social Structure, Reasonable Gain, and Entrepreneurship in Africa,” Strategic Management Journal 37 (2016): 1118-1131.
Global Innovation Reimagined
Global Innovation Reimagined showcases reflections and research on innovation in its many forms across Asia, North America, and Europe. The perspectives offered herein draw from discussions during the trilateral Reimagining Entrepreneurship and Innovation conference, hosted by CAPRI, CAPRI USA, the University of Virginia, and Copenhagen Business School from July 22 to 25, 2025.
Cultivating Entrepreneurship from Communities to the Global Level
Author
Sarah Jack
Entrepreneurship and Strategy Department, Lancaster University Management School
Biography
Sarah Jack is Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at Lancaster University Management School, United Kingdom. She is also an affiliated researcher with the House of Innovation and Misum, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden, and Audencia Business School, Nantes, France. Her research focuses on the social dimensions of entrepreneurship, particularly social networks and social capital, explored through qualitative methodologies. She is an editor of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and associate editor of Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. She has also published widely in leading academic journals. Sarah also held a 5-year leadership role at the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management.
The Silicon Valley model positions entrepreneurship as high growth, high value, disruptive, technologically driven, opportunity seeking, and venture capital backed.[i] It has shaped policy thinking across the globe, encouraging governments to pursue and support the gazelles and unicorns of entrepreneurship. Increasingly, critiques of this view of entrepreneurship are becoming prominent. In particular, there is a growing recognition of the social value of entrepreneurship, supporting the notion that the everyday entrepreneurs and communities they work with warrant greater support and investment.
In 2019, Audretsch identified four major issues with this model of entrepreneurship: (1) the model focuses disproportionately on outliers and exceptional cases; (2) it marginalizes the far more common forms of entrepreneurship, such as self-employment, small business ownership, and family business; (3) it overlooks substantial empirical evidence demonstrating the economic importance of more diverse forms of start-ups; and (4) it has biased policy toward entrepreneurship that conforms to the Silicon Valley template.[ii] Audretsch’s critique thus underscores the social value of entrepreneurship and suggests the need to redirect attention and support toward the majority of entrepreneurs, who are not the Silicon Valley type, and the work they undertake in their everyday lives.
This shift in focus also raises vital questions about identity, cultural expectations, and inequality, including what it means to enact entrepreneurial roles within ordinary, lived situations and why attending to these experiences is essential for fully understanding entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is often positioned as a key driver of economic growth, employment, and prosperity. Although these economic outcomes are attractive to governments and policymakers, entrepreneurial activity ultimately depends on individuals’ ability to access relevant resources and creatively (re)combine them to generate change. This underscores the importance of understanding not only the economic potential of entrepreneurship but also the everyday capacities, constraints, and lived realities of entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship is a form of change, but the types of change it produces vary widely across contexts. Context affects both the available opportunities and the ways in which entrepreneurial activity is practiced. Thus, entrepreneurial processes are deeply embedded in social, cultural, and spatial environments and cannot be understood apart from these influences.
Inequality, identity, and cultural norms also shape entrepreneurship. Although dominant perspectives have historically centered on the Global North, conversations are increasingly turning toward the Global South. This shift is critical, reflecting recognition that there are many ways to “do” entrepreneurship, to innovate, and to enact entrepreneurial practice. Recognizing these diverse expressions of entrepreneurship allows us to deepen our understanding of its global practice and positions us to develop the support and policy mechanisms that are genuinely needed in different contexts.
Entrepreneurship and context
In many contexts, entrepreneurship arises out of necessity rather than from recognizing opportunity. It may serve as a means of survival or reflect the absence of viable alternatives. Consequently, entrepreneurship can take on distinctly different forms across settings. New businesses may be created by entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurial activity does not occur in a vacuum; it is profoundly shaped by place, community dynamics, and social relationships that enable or constrain individuals’ ability to act entrepreneurially, establish new ventures, and create value. These dimensions of entrepreneurship should not be overlooked.
The role of community in entrepreneurship is critical, yet this relationship remains insufficiently understood. Community and society provide essential structures within which entrepreneurship takes place, yet communities can both include and exclude individuals. For example, fear of failure and how failure might be judged within the community can have devastating consequences for an entrepreneur and their family. Entrepreneurship can also replicate or deepen existing social problems rather than contributing to a more secure or thriving society. Understanding entrepreneurship not simply as an individual act but one taking place in, through, and with communities is therefore vital. This view inherently takes into account community connectedness, which helps explain how factors such as racial integration, community cohesion, and social ties across ethnic groups shape entrepreneurial activity.[iii] Such entrepreneurship can recreate, renew, and reify purposeful identities for places and their futures, grounded in meaningful and context-sensitive opportunities that align with local needs, resources, and capabilities.[iv]
Institutions also influence economic processes and, thus, entrepreneurial activity. Too often, we assume institutional stability, yet such conditions are rarely present in transitional settings – where institutions are undergoing significant change – or in peripheral contexts that lie outside the core of economic and political power.[v] Each country has its own institutional dynamics shaped by history, politics, and culture; thus, no two environments are alike. What we do understand is that stable institutions tend to be more supportive of entrepreneurship, whereas unstable institutional environments can pose challenges for entrepreneurs. Yet familiarity with the local context and its institutional logics and constraints can enable entrepreneurs to navigate these challenges more effectively.
The engaged university as an institution of entrepreneurship
Universities represent a distinctive institutional form. The shift in university “third mission” or “engagement” agendas toward social and sustainability objectives aligns with what scholars describe as the engaged university.[vi] Such universities balance social and economic goals not only by facilitating knowledge transfer across sectors but also by working directly with local stakeholders.[vii] Through these partnerships, universities help build trust and social capital, strengthen interpersonal relationships, and contribute to addressing locally defined challenges. They also create both social and economic value and support the development of innovation ecosystems that generate wider societal benefits.
The engaged university concept is also increasingly central to framing universities’ roles in sustainability and regional development, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals, often through engagement in social innovation.[viii] Social innovation can involve the creation of new institutional environments (e.g., formal and informal rules), new spatial and procedural arrangements, new relationships and networks (e.g., collaborations, values, skills, practices, and learning processes), and new fields of activity such as social entrepreneurship and social enterprise.[ix]
How might the engaged university work alongside entrepreneurs and communities to generate sustainable and inclusive societal impact? The answer lies in recognizing that many effective solutions emerge from the bottom up, through community-led action. Examples of such grassroots innovation include solar cooking devices, new methods for cooking and cultivating rice under conditions of severe water scarcity, improved promotion and distribution of menstrual health products, and regenerative agricultural practices. These innovations are grounded in lived experience, real-world constraints, and the deep local knowledge of entrepreneurs who understand the issues firsthand and are motivated to act for societal benefit. Yet many community-rooted models remain overlooked or undersupported because they do not align with traditional investor expectations or with the assumptions embedded in the Silicon Valley model of entrepreneurship. With their focus on sustainability and regional development, engaged universities can play a critical role in recognizing, supporting, and scaling community-rooted innovations, thereby contributing to the uplifting of places.
Community-centered entrepreneurship offers a powerful alternative frame centered on reciprocity, stewardship, long-term societal well-being, and the creation of shared value rather than the extraction and rapid scaling of economic value. In this context, the engaged university can work alongside communities to support, legitimize, and elevate diverse forms of innovation that meaningfully address local needs. Three university engagement activities I have been engaged with where this has happened are the Smart Village Movement, an initiative led by UC Berkely’s Gatewood Centre for Corporate Innovation; RECIRCULATE, an initiative led by Lancaster University, UK; and SIMRA, an initiative led by The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, UK.
The Smart Village Movement in rural India illustrates how the engaged university working in partnership with diverse stakeholders can contribute to meaningful, locally grounded innovation.[x] The initiative seeks to transform rural development through collaborative problem-solving, bringing together government, industry, academic institutions, and community actors to coinnovate solutions to local challenges. Its mission is “to contribute to the enhancement of the overall well-being of rural communities, fostering resilience, independence, and prosperity while bridging the rural–urban divide”; this statement captures the essence of bottom-up, community-led innovation supported by global networks.
The EU Horizon 2020 project SIMRA examined social innovation and governance in marginalized and rural areas across agriculture, forestry, and rural development.[xi] Through an extensive program of case studies, SIMRA identified the triggers, drivers, development patterns, success factors, and evaluation criteria associated with rural social innovation. It also produced a publicly accessible database of community-led initiatives. SIMRA showed that building social capital, reshaping local social practices, and providing enabling policy frameworks can generate significant societal benefits. It further revealed opportunities to better recognize and support the scale and scope of social innovation emerging from rural communities.
RECIRCULATE was a £7-million transdisciplinary project led by Lancaster University and funded by the UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund.[xii] RECIRCULATE aimed to build robust and equitable partnerships between UK and African researchers and a broad range of stakeholders, including policymakers, entrepreneurs, government bodies, managers, and students. Centered on ecoinnovation and the development of a safe circular water economy, the project deliberately embedded a workstream on entrepreneurship, innovation, and stakeholder engagement to identify the optimal ecosystem for African research institutions to work with, in, and for their communities. RECIRCULATE demonstrates how strengthening institutional capacity, partnership practices, and engagement processes at the local level can contribute to more sustainable and context-appropriate innovation ecosystems. In Africa, female entrepreneurship is expanding. George et al. (2016) observed that women who head households are especially likely to start new businesses during periods of social disruption or institutional breakdown.[xiii] Accordingly, policymakers in Africa should prioritize support for women by strengthening access to advice, resources, and networks, thereby creating a more enabling and equitable environment in which women are better positioned and supported to pursue entrepreneurial activity.
Taken together, these examples demonstrate how engaged universities can act as critical partners in enabling, legitimizing, and amplifying locally grounded entrepreneurial innovation that advances inclusive and sustainable development.
Conclusion and Policy Implications
The social benefits of entrepreneurship across different contexts remain insufficiently understood. Consider, for instance, the family business that continues to employ workers during economic downturns not because doing so maximizes profit but because the social and economic consequences of job loss would be severe for local households. Such relational, community-centered decisions illustrate forms of value creation that fall outside conventional economic measures yet are fundamental to social stability and collective well-being. Moving forward, policy frameworks could be designed to offer broader evaluation criteria beyond firm growth and profitability to include social stability, community resilience, and place-based value creation. There is also a persistent funding gap, namely the limited availability of appropriate finance at the community level. Expanding financial support tailored to locally embedded ventures could yield significant benefits, but it also raises complex questions about governance, accountability, and the design of financial mechanisms that genuinely meet community needs rather than reproduce existing inequities. Entrepreneurial success is often shaped less by individual ambition or talent and more by access to capital, networks, and supportive institutions. This reinforces a growing call for more inclusive forms of entrepreneurship and innovation—approaches that work with communities to address their needs and that bring diverse stakeholders together to build shared value. Understanding entrepreneurship as fundamentally embedded in place and community helps reveal how new entrepreneurial possibilities can emerge from local knowledge, relationships, and capabilities. When social purpose is meaningfully aligned with economic outcomes, the effects can be transformative: community well-being strengthens, local identities are renewed, and new opportunities begin to take shape. Entrepreneurship policy could even be designed as a cocreative process, with communities involved from agenda-setting through to implementation and evaluation. Achieving such outcomes, however, requires a substantial shift—from top-down interventions toward approaches that empower communities, value their expertise, and position them as cocreators rather than passive recipients of externally designed solutions.
[i] Howard E. Aldrich and Martin Ruef, “Unicorns, Gazelles, and Other Distractions on the Way to Understanding Real Entrepreneurship in the United States,” Academy of Management Perspectives 32, no. 4 (2018): 458-472, https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2017.0123; Friederike Welter et al., “Three Waves and Counting: The Rising Tide of Contextualization in Entrepreneurship Research,” Small Business Economics 52, no. 2 (2019): 319-330, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-018-0094-5.
[ii] David B. Audretsch, “Have We Oversold the Silicon Valley Model of Entrepreneurship?” Small Business Economics 56, no. 2 (2021): 849-856, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00272-4.
[iii] Sampsa Samila and Olav Sorenson, “Community and Capital in Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 4 (2017): 770–795, https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122417711699.
[iv] Edward McKeever et al., “Embedded Entrepreneurship in the Creative Re-construction of Place,” Journal of Business Venturing 30, no. 1 (2015): 50-65, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2014.07.002.
[v] David Smallbone and Friederike Welter, “Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change in Transition Economies: The Commonwealth of Independent States, Central and Eastern Europe and China Compared,” Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 24, no. 3–4 (2012): 215–233, https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2012.670914.
[vi] Shiri M. Breznitz and Maryann P. Feldman, “The Engaged University,” The Journal of Technology Transfer 37, no. 2 (2012): 139–157, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-010-9183-6.
7 E. Thomas et al., Beyond ambidexterity: Universities and their changing roles in driving regional development in challenging times, The Journal of Technology Transfer, 48 no. 6 (2023): 2054–2073, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-022-09992-4
[viii] M. Kathleen Burke et al., “The Engaged University Delivering Social Innovation,” The Journal of Technology Transfer 49, no. 6 (2024): 2056–2079., https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-024-10091-9.
[ix] Social Innovation in Marginalized Rural Areas (SIMRA), “Home,” accessed November 2025, http://www.simra-h2020.eu/.
[x] Smart Village Movement, “Home,” accessed January 2, 2026, https://www.smartvillagemovement.org/.
[xi] SIMRA, “Home,” Accessed Feburary 9, 2026, http://www.simra-h2020.eu/.
[xii] RECIRCULATE, “Home,” accessed January 2, 2026, https://recirculate.global/.
[xiii] Gerard George et al., “Social Structure, Reasonable Gain, and Entrepreneurship in Africa,” Strategic Management Journal 37 (2016): 1118-1131.
Global Innovation Reimagined
Global Innovation Reimagined showcases reflections and research on innovation in its many forms across Asia, North America, and Europe. The perspectives offered herein draw from discussions during the trilateral Reimagining Entrepreneurship and Innovation conference, hosted by CAPRI, CAPRI USA, the University of Virginia, and Copenhagen Business School from July 22 to 25, 2025.
About the Author
Sarah Jack
More
The AI Infrastructure Revolution: Asia in the New Map of Global Innovation
Keynote address by Dr. Syaru Shirley Lin, CAPRI Founder and Chair, at the Morgan Stanley Asia AI Summit in Taipei on May 28, 2026.
Venture Funding, Digitalization, and the Need for a New Narrative on Women’s Entrepreneurship
Maija Renko analyzes the gender inequities in the technology startup sector and proposes more inclusive ways to consider entrepreneurial success.
The Energy Paradox of Taiwan’s Sovereign AI Ambition
Siwei Huang discusses how Taiwan’s “sovereign AI” vision is running on fragile energy foundations. In a period defined by geopolitical competition and energy uncertainty, Taiwan needs to strengthen its energy resilience to advance digital sovereignty and technological power.