Abstract
Lifestyle entrepreneurs play an important role in innovation and sustainability in rural destinations. Their competitiveness depends largely on how they explore their link to the place and generate innovation. To analyze the relationship between the link to the place and innovation, this article uses survey data from a sample of 221 rural lifestyle entrepreneurs. Using PLS-SEM modeling, the results indicate that place familiarity and relational capital positively influence innovation. Furthermore, place familiarity reveals as an important factor for improving relational capital. In its turn, the degree of relational capital contributes positively to the small firm’s knowledge absorption. The results also reveal that, although there is no direct relation between knowledge absorption and innovation, relational capital mediates the relationship between place familiarity and innovation and that there is an indirect relationship between relational capital and innovation, through the mediating effect of knowledge absorption. These results provides important elements for rural tourism destination decision making on innovation and competitiveness.
Highlights
In the universe of small businesses, lifestyle entrepreneurs (LE) represent a significant portion (Getz & Carlsen, 2000; Thomas et al, 2011), being associated with innovative and more sustainable practices when compared to large companies (Bosworth & Farrell, 2011; Stamboulis & Skayannis, 2003; Wang et al, 2019)
We assessed the indicators of reliability, convergent validity, internal consistency reliability, and discriminant validity to evaluate the quality of the measurement model (Hair et al, 2017) (See Table 1)
The results reveal that the place familiarity and relational capital influence the innovation generated by LE in rural areas
Summary
In the universe of small businesses, lifestyle entrepreneurs (LE) represent a significant portion (Getz & Carlsen, 2000; Thomas et al, 2011), being associated with innovative and more sustainable practices when compared to large companies (Bosworth & Farrell, 2011; Stamboulis & Skayannis, 2003; Wang et al, 2019) Research on this class of entrepreneurs is still scarce (Dias et al, 2020a; Hoarau, 2014). Professor Dias has over 26 years of teaching experience He has had several visiting positions in different countries and institutions including Brazil, Angola, Spain, Poland, and Finland. Professor Dias has produced extensive research in the field of Tourism and Management, including books, book chapters, papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings, case studies, and working papers
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