Spurring inclusive entrepreneurship through creative cross-pollinations

Abstract

The ever-changing employment landscape presents various challenges for job-seekers. Entrepreneurship is often touted as an alternative to waged employment, but this requires particular competences and conditions that are not uniformly distributed across the population. Notably, most entrepreneurs are ‘core age men’ (30-49 years old), who tend to be better skilled, financed and connected than groups who are under-represented in entrepreneurship, such as women, youths, migrants, seniors, persons with disability, and the unemployed (OECD, 2021). In view of these circumstances, inclusive entrepreneurship, which refers to self-employment among disadvantaged and under-represented groups, has attracted increasing interest from scholars and policy makers. Research indicates that different groups have skill-sets that would be useful but incomplete for entrepreneurship. For example, youths have digital skills that many seniors are lacking, seniors often possess business management skills that youths and persons with disability are missing, while migrants may benefit from language and cultural integration skills which the other groups may have. Although each group is heterogenous and the above are generalisations, there may be inclusive entrepreneurship opportunities through creative cross-pollinations between groups. This conceptual paper contributes to the literature by being the first to propose Glaveanu’s (2013) Five A’s of creativity as a framework to spur inclusive entrepreneurship, whereby: (1) individuals from under-represented groups are the Actors; (2) collaboration between Actors in entrepreneurial activities are the Actions; (3) products or services brought to market are the Artifacts; (4) customers are the Audiences; and (5) any support needed for the above to materialise are the Affordances.