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The creation of growth and development in rural regions presents a key challenge for both researchers and policy makers. In this paper, we explore entrepreneurial exaptation as a mechanism for creating regional development in rural regions characterised by organisational thinness. Exaptation as a source of innovation involves the adoption of one or more resources for a different purpose than it was originally intended or designed for. Using a longitudinal field study of a region in rural Sweden and a garden-themed new venture based on the exaptation of local resources, we show how exaptation can initiate a positive development path in a hitherto lagging rural region. Through collective agency, involving entrepreneurs and locals, the exaptation creates an epistemological displacement that discloses concrete and abstract affordances in local resources. Overall, our study points to the importance of entrepreneurial exaptation as a source of innovation in rural regions and suggests that regional development paths are not determined by lock-in effects and path dependencies related to existing resource bases. • Exaptation is an important mechanism for development in rural regions. • Rural resource environments are enacted. • Regional development trajectories are not determined by resources. • Collective entrepreneurial agency is essential in rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses entrepreneurship in a depleted community in transition. The purpose is to develop knowledge about how discourses are used in the positioning of identity in regional development. The concept positioning illustrates how identities are provoked, challenged, negotiated and moved into identity positions that break away from the idea of imitating successful and wealthy regions; instead, locality, place and history emerge as important resources from where local actors obtain agency and recognize new opportunities. Ethnographic data of a single case were collected over a six-year period between 2005 and 2010. The longitudinal nature of the study made it possible to incorporate how local stakeholders took on new identity positions, while handling their inspiration as well as their frustration. Results show how rural change was conditioned by discourses and how entrepreneurship challenged and reframed dominating structures through interaction between entrepreneurship and community. Four discourses, expressed as dichotomies available to people in this depleted community, illustrate the interactive process of positioning: change vs. traditions, rational vs. irrational, spectacular vs. mundane and individual vs. collective. The results support research emphasizing perspectives that acknowledge interaction between entrepreneurship and context as well as discursive aspects of regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial activities are strongly influenced by the context in which they occur. It is therefore imperative to understand how different contexts enable entrepreneurs to create opportunities. In this paper, we focus on the spatial context of rural entrepreneurs and explore how the rural context impacts on their opportunity creation. Based on a multiple case study, we find that rural entrepreneurs mix what we refer to as placial embeddedness – an intimate knowledge of and concern for the place – with strategically built non-local networks, i.e. the best of two worlds. Notably, the entrepreneurs seek to exhaust the localized resource base before seeking out non-local resources. Our findings thus contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurship in context and challenge future research to explore how different forms of contexts are bridged in different settings to create varieties of entrepreneurial activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]