Exploring Entrepreneurial Skills and Competencies in Farm Tourism

Diversification to farm tourism is increasingly seen as a viable development strategy to promote a more diverse and sustainable rural economy and to counter declining farm incomes. However, our understanding of the dynamics of the modern farm tourism business and the entrepreneurial and competitive skills farmers require in making the transition from agriculture to a diversified - and service based - enterprise remains limited. Hence, the aim of this paper is to explore the range of skills and competencies that farmers in the North West of England identify as important when adopting a diversification strategy to farm tourism. With the findings indicating that that whilst a range of managerial skills are valued by farmers, they lack many of the additional business and entrepreneurial competencies required for success. Moreover, this paper acknowledges the need to generate consensus on the requisite skill-set that farm tourism operators require, along with a need for a currently fragmented rural tourism literature to acknowledge the significance of rural entrepreneurship and the characteristics of successful farmers and farm tourism ventures

Latent and actual entrepreneurship in Europe and the US: some recent developments

This paper uses 2004 survey data from the 15 old EU member states and the US to explain country differences in latent and actual entrepreneurship. Other than demographic variables such as gender, age and education, the set of covariates includes the perception by respondents of administrative complexities, of availability of financial support and of risk tolerance as well as country-specific effects. A comparison is made with results using a similar survey in 2000. While a majority of the surveyed population identifies lack of financial support as an obstacle to starting a new business, the role of this variable in both latent and actual entrepreneurship appears to be even more counterintuitive in 2004 than in 2000.

Size matters: entrepreneurial entry and government

We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from corruption, and on 'market freedom' defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property rights and regulation. We test these relationships by combining country-level institutional indicators for 47 countries with working age population survey data taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial entry is inversely related to the size of the government, and more weakly to the extent of corruption. A cluster of institutional indicators representing 'market freedom' is only significant in some specifications. Freedom from corruption is significantly related to entrepreneurial entry, especially when the richest countries are removed from the sample but unlike the size of government, the results on corruption are not confirmed by country-level fixed effects models

Businessman or Host? Individual Differences between Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners in the Hospitality Industry

Prior research has identified individual characteristics that distinguish business owners from non-business owners. We tested our contention that not every successful business owner can be characterized by such typical “entrepreneurial” characteristics. Multiple Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) on a unique dataset of 194 business owners in the hospitality industry revealed that several individual characteristics discriminated between entrepreneurs and small business owners. Entrepreneurs possessed higher levels of independence, tolerance of ambiguity, risk-taking propensity, innovativeness, and leadership qual

Entrepreneurial opportunities recognition in Sub-Saharan Africa: a proposed model for investigation

Earlier studies have predominantly investigated entrepreneurial opportunities recognition from either the discovery or creation perspectives in the developed economies of America and Europe respectively. These efforts have mostly generated contradictory theories or models, which are not suitable for universal investigation of entrepreneurial opportunities. This paper uses the principles of metatheory to integrate the two dominant theories of entrepreneurial opportunities to propose a Multiple Opportunities Recognition Universal Framework (MORUF), then used it to study entrepreneurial opportunities recognition process within an entirely new context of Sub-Saharan Africa. Qualitative data collected from 38 nascent entrepreneurs in Nigeria were used to test the model. Findings reveal that opportunity exists in more than one form, can transit from one state to another and be recognised either through the discovery or creation process. This paper offers an alternative framework to study multiple entrepreneurial opportunities and provides practical relevance for doing so, for practitioners

Intrapreneurship; Conceptualizing entrepreneurial employee behaviour

This paper discusses the similarities and differences between intrapreneurship and independent entrepreneurship. Most but not all of the activities and behavioural aspects of the latter are also typical of the former phenomenon. Key differential elements of independent entrepreneurship are the investment of personal financial means and the related financial risk taking, a higher degree of autonomy, and legal and fiscal aspects of establishing a new independent business. Based on this discussion an integral conceptual model of intrapreneurial behaviour is presented. The paper closes with conclusions.

Nurturing and Leveraging Virtual Communities: A Two-Dimensional Process Model

Despite the optimism surrounding the business potential of virtual communities (VCs), our knowledge of how VCs can be nurtured and leveraged to create value for the organizations that sponsor them is limited. To address this knowledge gap, a two-dimensional process model of the development and leverage of a VC is inductively derived from a case study of one of the most commercially successful VCs in Singapore. The model suggests that different IT competencies drive the development of various VC-enabled capabilities in different stages of VC maturity. Moreover, as the VC becomes increasingly mature, the number of ways in which it can be leveraged for organizational value creation increases. With its findings, this study sheds light on the key mechanisms of VC-enabled organizational value creation, and provides a comprehensive and empirically grounded framework for practitioners to analyze and optimize their investments in VCs

Entrepreneurship and its determinants in a cross-country setting

The relative stability of differences in entrepreneurial activity across countries suggests that other than economic factors are at play. The present paper offers some new thoughts about the determinants of entrepreneurial attitudes and activities by testing the relationship between institutional variables and cross-country differences in the preferences for self-employment as well as in actual selfemployment. Data of the 25 member states of the European Union as well as the US are used. The results show that country specific (cultural) variables seem to explain the preference for entrepreneurship but not the actual entrepreneurship. The present paper also introduces the remaining four papers of the special issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics around the theme Entrepreneurship and Culture.

Attracting the Entrepreneurial Potential: A Multilevel Institutional Approach

The research on institutions’ role in entrepreneurship acknowledges that formal and informal institutions matter. However, previous research has stressed less the co-existence and interaction between individual- and country-level factors that shape entrepreneurial potential, population of skill-full individuals with no entrepreneurial intentions, across countries. In this study, we investigate the multilevel influence of informal institutions on entrepreneurial potential. Drawing from institutional theory and multilevel approach in a sample of 880,576 individuals for the period 2006–2016, we find that the informal country-level institutional forces compensate the lack of individual-level factors among those with low entrepreneurial potential. For instance, media coverage on entrepreneurship or education can enhance the entrepreneurial potential in its lower end. Hence, our findings provide novel evidence on the relevance and interaction of the informal institutions among potential entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest policy implications regarding educational programs to close the gap between entrepreneurially skilled non-potential and skilled potential individual

Latent and actual entrepreneurship in Europe and the US: some recent developments

This paper uses 2004 survey data from the 15 old EU member states and the US to explain country differences in latent and actual entrepreneurship. Other than demographic variables such as gender, age and education, the set of covariates includes the perception by respondents of administrative complexities, of availability of financial support and of risk tolerance as well as country-specific effects. A comparison is made with results using a similar survey in 2000. While a majority of the surveyed population identifies lack of financial support as an obstacle to starting a new business, the role of this variable in both latent and actual entrepreneurship appears to be even more counterintuitive in 2004 than in 2000: it has no impact on actual entrepreneurship and is positively related to latent entrepreneurship. Administrative complexities, also perceived as an obstacle by a large majority of the population, have the expected negative impact both for latent and actual entrepreneurship in both years. Country-specific effects are important both for latent and actual entrepreneurship and the comparison of 2000 and 2004 results suggests that, once all other factors are controlled for, an improvement in actual entrepreneurship in the EU relative to the US has taken place in the last four years. However, in terms of unweighted averages actual entrepreneurship remained about the same. Latent entrepreneurship dropped while this drop seems to have occurred evenly in the US and the EU member states