The purpose of this study is to determine whether new rural ventures represent effective rural entrepreneurship or are just entrepreneurial ventures located in rural settings.
Data were collected from a direct questionnaire involving 408 new ventures headquartered in Portuguese business incubators and science parks, of which 142 are located in rural areas. To analyse data, the authors performed a preliminary and exploratory statistical analysis.
The authors demonstrate that only a small percentage of ventures operating in rural areas constitute examples of effective “rural entrepreneurship”, with the bulk of them being just enterprises located in rural settings. Rural new ventures tend to be small (in terms of employees and turnover), rely mainly on the internal market and lag behind other new ventures (located in both rural and urban municipalities) in terms of performance.
The study only includes new knowledge-intensive ventures, that is, those headquartered in business incubators and science parks. Therefore, it cannot be generalised to other new ventures located in rural settings.
The extant literature on entrepreneurship has neglected the empirical implications of mixing, confounding and/or merging the concepts of “rural entrepreneurship” and “entrepreneurship activities in rural areas”. In this study, the authors discuss and analyse the empirical boundaries of such concepts and uncover the magnitude of pure “rural entrepreneurship”.
