What is Entrepreneurial Culture?

The Carleton Centre for Community Innovation's project for Fostering an Entrepreneurial Culture looks at ways to encourage individual self-reliance within a framework of community vision. The phrase "entrepreneurial culture" refers to the presence in a given community of attitudes of self-reliance, self-advocacy, and perseverance. Entrepreneurial culture differs from classic "lone maverick" entrepreneurship by encouraging local volunteerism, sharing of community resources, collective visioning, goal-setting, and regional advocacy. These collaborative approaches are essential responses by rural and remote Canadian communities to post-industrial shifts in globalization, environment, knowledge economy, and social innovation.

Entrepreneurial culture also recognizes that individuals are motivated by activities that will build their personal identities, transferable skills, and support networks. One of the essential mechanisms for achieving this balance is the provision of a wide range of lifelong learning opportunities. Community members acquire skills of visioning, social networking, recognition of and response to opportunities, and self-directed learning, to produce an "entrepreneurial" social operating milieu that creates opportunities for themselves and others.

What LEAP success looks like: Participants completing the LEAP program go on to pursue one or more of the following:

  1. Enterprise development based on a carefully developed and realistic business idea
  2. Further training based on their business or employment goals
  3. Community‐based projects based on identified community development needs


Why is Entrepreneurial Culture important?

  • Rural Canada is beginning to reinvent itself for the new economy.
  • This challenge provides many opportunities for rural revitalization.
  • Social capital networks of talent and know-how generate local action and are the drivers of this revitalization.
  • Stimulating local entrepreneurship creates social capital, reduces unemployment, and helps achieve revitalization objectives.
  • Communities need a support mechanism that helps individuals conceive, design, and act on entrepreneurial opportunities.
  • The LEAP program provides that support mechanism.