Bringing Entrepreneurship into the Context of Community Development

Using the emerging concept of community entrepreneurship, this paper examines the process by which a backward community pursues community development, and finds out some factors that facilitate or inhibit this entrepreneurial process. Community entrepreneurship is not a single-step, one-time activity, but the process of a series of activities that pass through several steps. Building on the review of prior research, we constructed a stepwise model of community entrepreneurship, which consists of social infrastructure building, opportunity recognition, and implementation. Then, we derived four critical factors involved in the process of community entrepreneurship: exclusive social capital, inclusive social capital, leadership, and strength of external links. Overall, empirical analyses of community leaders supported the stepwise model presented here. It is also found that while social capital was an important factor in the early stage of community entrepreneurship, leadership and abundance in external links rose to prominence in the later stage. This suggests that each step of community entrepreneurship has a unique set of obstacles that must be overcome and facilitators that must be exploited.