Chapter 1: Rural Entrepreneurship: Harvesting Ideas and Sowing New Seeds

At a time when entrepreneurship research increasingly emphasises the importance of ‘context’ (Welter et al., 2019), this edited book offers a chance to reflect on a growing body of rural scholarship that has long understood the need to ‘investigate the wider economic, social and institutional context within which the entrepreneurial process takes place … [to support] … the effective design, delivery and implementation of competent entrepreneurial polices’ (Stathopoulou et al., 2004). Each chapter examines what we have learnt about an aspect of rural entrepreneurship and what still needs to be understood.

The purpose of this edited book is to celebrate how far we have come in understanding different dimensions of rural entrepreneurship, reflect on our earlier transgressions, break down our assumptions to spawn new research directions, and highlight foreseeable challenges in the contemporary climate emergency and post-Covid-19 world. The fluidity of demographic, socioeconomic, workplace, lifestyle, and physical geographic dimensions make rural entrepreneurship an engaging and exciting real-world subject that has meaning and ramifications for swathes of the population either directly or indirectly.