Nomadic entrepreneurship : heading out for international business opportunities

Abstract

The concept of digital nomadism is gaining increasing attention as a lifestyle and mainstream approach to working. This study seeks to gain an initial understanding of the nomadic entrepreneur, a new emerging social figure within digital nomadism. Nomadic entrepreneurs are location-independent entrepreneurs exploiting business opportunities within the digital ecosystem to support a lifestyle of geographical, personal and economic freedom. There is limited research in the field of digital nomadism and the concept of the ‘nomadic entrepreneur’ or ‘nomadic entrepreneurship’ has not yet been widely studied in mainstream academic entrepreneurship journals. The aim of this study is to develop an initial understanding of the nomadic entrepreneur and to stimulate research on this form of entrepreneurship and this emerging lifestyle. First, this study explores the characteristics of this new emerging type of entrepreneur to garner an initial understanding of the ‘digital nomad’ within entrepreneurship. The study then sets out to understand how nomadic entrepreneurs identify business opportunities within the digital ecosystem. The issues are explored using a qualitative approach guided by the framework of digital entrepreneurial entrepreneurship (Susan & Acs, 2017) and the opportunity identification framework (George et al., 2015). Thirteen in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with nomadic entrepreneurs. The collected data was then analysed using a thematic approach. The interviews revealed that nomadic entrepreneurs constantly identify new opportunities and that traveling influences this, mainly through the varying social contacts and changing environments. The findings suggest that nomadic entrepreneurs are motivated to pursue nomadic entrepreneurship because it allows them to maximise their freedom, flexibility in lifestyle design and stimulate their high need for stimuli by a constant flow of new experiences and social contacts. Nomadic entrepreneurs mainly travel for lifestyle purposes. It appears that once their current business fulfills the nomadic entrepreneur’s needs, they will not pursue the exploration of new ventures, despite the recurring recognition of novel opportunities. The study concluded that for nomadic entrepreneurs, ventures serve as means to support a certain lifestyle and therefore economic growth is prioritized after lifestyle design.