Abstract
Entrepreneurship initiatives that could have an impact in rural areas are embedded in broader agricultural, rural development or structural policies at the European Union level. Nevertheless, there is a prevailing lack of rural strategies focused on entrepreneurship, especially in aging and depopulated EU rural regions. In this context, the need to have real experiences as an empirical contribution to the academic, political and professional spheres is identified. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the current empirical research throughout a real experience and its capitalization. The paper portrays the design and implementation of a rural entrepreneurship strategy, in a very depopulated area, engaging civil society participation by adapting the ‘Working With People’ model to the idiosyncratic conditions of the context. The study then considers the main factors of this strategy by analyzing its application in a wider area in the province of Ávila, Spain. We find that rural entrepreneurship can be enriched by strategies designed and assessed by the beneficiaries from the early stages of formulation. This experience is supported by the ‘Fundación Tatiana Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno’, a non-profit institution that manages its legacy to achieve social goals in youth training, scientific research and environmental fields.
Highlights
Entrepreneurship is an old but continually emerging field that attracts the attention of academics, policymakers and practitioners in various fields of economics, finance, management and sociology [1]
We explore key elements to increase the likelihood of achieving the implicit objective in the rural entrepreneurship strategy as well the satisfaction of the parties involved
Identification of main actors: The identification of the main local and external actors to define a rural entrepreneurship strategy has been crucial to achieve a major involvement in the participatory processes as well as a higher acceptance of the jointly agreed elements
Summary
Entrepreneurship is an old but continually emerging field that attracts the attention of academics, policymakers and practitioners in various fields of economics, finance, management and sociology [1] In recent decades, it has been studied as a catalyst for development and as a key factor in achieving economic growth, job creation and increased productivity [2,3]. Many scholars today agree that entrepreneurship is the result of the interaction between individual attributes and the local surrounding environment [17,18,19] and, it is not addressed as an isolated economic activity but as a social activity embedded in many cultural and economic contexts [20] In this sense, several studies relate entrepreneurship with spatial context and more recently with the concept of places. Spatial contexts is seen as a physical extension that entails proximity or distance in social relations while the notion of places entails that spatial context embraces experiential dimensions such as representations, meanings, imagery and emotional attachment to locations that can affect entrepreneurship in several ways [21]
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