Indigenous Perspectives on Entrepreneurship

Author

Stephen Cummings

University of Sydney Business School, Australia

Biography

Stephen Cummings is Professor of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at The University of Sydney, Australia, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Rethinking Entrepreneurship Project at Copenhagen Business School supported by the Carlsberg Foundation. He is the author or editor of 12 books that explore how assumed historical definitions of concepts and institutions can limit imagination and innovation, including The Past, Present and Future of Sustainable Management (Palgrave, 2021). He is the editor (with Jesse Pirini and Ana Maria Peredo) of the forthcoming book Indigenous Management: Knowledges and Frameworks (Sage, 2026). He is also a member of the leadership team of IARIMOS, the Indigenous Academy of Management.

I am from Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) in Aotearoa New Zealand. While I am not Indigenous but rather an “ally,” many of my close collaborators are Indigenous, including Jesse Pirini and Ana Maria Peredo, co-editors with me of the new book Indigenous Management: Knowledges and Frameworks. On behalf of this work and the larger Indigenous Academy of Management (IARIMOS) project, and in keeping with the spirit of the theme of “reimagining entrepreneurship,” I would like to offer some ideas to help us challenge existing tropes, rethink what entrepreneurship is about, and reimagine what it is to be an entrepreneur.

I would like to do this in two ways. First, we can deepen our definitions and the metaphors we imagine when we think of these terms. Second, we need to broaden perspectives beyond the kind of profiling we often do when we imagine who is likely to be an entrepreneur and what type of entrepreneur particular people can or should be.

Rethinking metaphors of entrepreneurship

Researching Indigenous entrepreneurship has shown us that entrepreneurs are not just the “tech bros” and “girl bosses” who create “unicorns”—fast-growing billion-dollar companies. While these folks are often seen as entrepreneurs in the media, one of my country’s most inspirational Māori entrepreneurs, Tui Te Hau, counters this conceptualization by saying, “we’d rather have one thousand awesome horses than one unicorn.”

In a similar vein, the metaphors that many Indigenous communities use to describe good entrepreneurship tend toward more plant-based or ecosystem images, where growth is gradual, symbiotic, and in keeping with place. For example, some contributors to Indigenous Management describe entrepreneurs as vines, weavers, or scaffolders. These metaphors are more relatable, sensible, available, or real to more people than unicorns are.

These ideas speak to the fact that while Indigenous approaches to entrepreneurship are not all the same, some common threads suggest a kind of entrepreneurship different from that often portrayed in the modern media and seen in our minds:

A kind of entrepreneurship that is focused on community and different views of what entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship exist to serve.

A kind of entrepreneurship where the goals are not just financial and pursued for an individual or investor’s rapid economic gain, and different from a view whereby entrepreneurs are encouraged to move fast and break things.

A kind of entrepreneurship where entrepreneurial governance structures involve a broader range of stakeholders: places, natural environments, people, other beings, ancestors, and future generations.

A kind of entrepreneurship where success is measured in terms of cultural, environmental, political, and social development as well as economic development.

A kind of entrepreneurship where the time scales by which entrepreneurs should be held accountable are measured in generations rather than quarters.

And a kind of entrepreneurship where our aims are not either the straight-line boom of extreme growth or the flat-lining decline of degrowth but focused on “regrowth” in a circular way, whereby entrepreneurs are accountable to give back to communities and the natural environment in ways that promote potentially slower, but sustainable, growth.

These are different ways of reimagining entrepreneurship that may come to us through Indigenous lenses, but they are not exclusively Indigenous. When I have presented similar ideas at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), people have said this seems similar to traditional Danish approaches. One of my favorite, but almost untranslatable, concepts in Danish, shared with me by Louise Karlskov Skyggebjerg from CBS, is Fællesskabets Bedste: that Danish firms in the past were highly regarded if they acted entrepreneurially in concert with “the best of, and for, the community.”

Avoiding stereotypes

This brings us to the second point of avoiding the dangers of profiling Indigenous entrepreneurs, Danish entrepreneurs, or any group, and pigeonholing them as being of a particular type. Indigenous entrepreneurship, or the more community-focused traditions of places like Denmark, can also be focused on economic and financial gain in a shareholder-based capitalistic way. We should not think that an Indigenous person cannot be an excellent tech entrepreneur or build a billion-dollar enterprise, or that an Indigenous entrepreneur is likely destined for social entrepreneurship or a craft business reflecting their local culture.

For example, it is not well known, but Aotearoa New Zealand has a fast-growing space industry (in 2025, more rockets were launched from Aotearoa than another other country apart from the US and China).^[i] In this industry, there are many Māori tech entrepreneurs and physicists and Māori-led businesses. To not appreciate the abilities of different peoples to transgress our conventional mental boundaries of entrepreneurship would be to replace current simplistic and limited imaginations with new ones that are also limiting.

Rethinking histories and heroes

What can we do to help our field reimagine and cultivate entrepreneurship by utilizing Indigenous and community-focused lenses? We may be able to do this through research into different perspectives, and we should seek to do this, but I believe that we may have more impact in the classroom, where we have the privilege of working with future generations of entrepreneurs, scholars, and community members.

Here, I believe that two changes would be especially helpful: Promoting different histories and promoting different heroes.

First, we can reimagine the history of entrepreneurship that we pass on to students.

For example, we imagine or assume that the field of economics begins with the invisible hand of markets and the division of labor, expressed in parts of Adam Smith’s second book The Wealth of Nations. But economics becomes a very different subject if we see its origins in Adam Smith’s first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This explored how people are naturally community-minded through the empathy, sympathy, and concern that they have for others. This is what builds the trust necessary for us to specialize in what we are best at and trade with others.

Similarly, instead of assuming and teaching that entrepreneurship starts with the notion of “creative destruction” attributed to Joseph Schumpeter, which lends itself to seeing the “tech bro” as the natural manifestation of what we imagine the field to be, we could think differently.^[ii] Entrepreneurial history does not have to start at the same point of origin followed by the same cavalcade of stale, pale males on the magazines’ lists of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. There is no reason, for example, why the history of entrepreneurship in Aotearoa New Zealand could not start with Kupe, who found our islands by venturing forth from Hawa’ik’i.

Relatedly, if we are seeking different behaviors, we should present different aspirational models for future generations in the classroom. For example, if teaching in the South Pacific, we might provide exemplars like Māori physicist Ratu Mataira, founder of Openstar and a key figure in the local space industry. Or we might focus on Tui Te Hau, or on Lucy Liu, a young New Zealand/Australian migrant from China fast becoming an Asia-Pacific entrepreneurial star as the founder and president of innovative start-up Airwallex. In this way, cultivating entrepreneurial thinking from a community perspective to the global level starts locally.

A broader range of heroes and more localized histories could help change the way we imagine entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship and open our imaginations to Indigenous and community-minded thinking.^[iii] We could always do more, but you can only be what you can see. Just making these two changes in the way we view the field would go a long way in helping us help future generations to reimagine entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship as serving community good as well as individual financial gain.

[i] Richard Easther, “Another space to punch above our weight,” University of Auckland, August 3, 2025, https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2025/08/02/another-space-to-punch-above-our-weight.html.

[ii] Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Harvard University Press:2007).

[iii] For more, see Daniel Butcher, “Indigenous Peoples Will Change How We Think about the Purpose of Business,” Academy of Management Today, December 3, 2025, https://today.aom.org/indigenous-peoples-will-change-how-we-think-about-the-purpose-of-business/