Business Entrepreneurship and Innovation Toward Poverty Reduction

<p>Ways in which poverty can be reduced in both countries and regions through business, entrepreneurship and government has been a hot issue for researchers and policymakers in recent years. Governments can play an important role in helping the poor people by non-profit organizations and others that help to seed business among the poor. Businesses increasingly also see the large number of people in severe poverty not only as an issue for social concern, but also as a potentially large untapped market of consumers for goods and services. Some scholars have called for poverty reduction through entrepreneurship owing to the fact that it can be an efficient path to also change the poor's attitudes and behaviours from a passive mode, to a more active mode towards poverty reduction economically and socially. In addition, the sharing economy brings opportunities where everyone is a micro-entrepreneur. There is a recognition that these types of entrepreneurship above could offer the greatest single potential means to move individuals out of poverty in the nations and regions in the next 5-10 years. </p><p>This book provides new and valuable analyses of poverty and business, entrepreneurship and innovation in current nations and regions including developing and developed countries. As business, entrepreneurship and innovation can help to generate greater business activity in settings of severe poverty, they will help to solve poverty, as individuals in severe poverty are able to both generate greater incomes and accumulate greater assets as they participate with large firms in those activities. </p><p>The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the <i>Entrepreneurship & Regional Development.</i></p> <p>Foreword</p><p>Alistair R Anderson</p><p>Introduction: Business, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Toward Poverty Reduction</p><p>Steven Si, David Ahlstrom, Jiang Wei and John Cullen</p><p>1. An anatomy of entrepreneurial pursuits in relation to poverty</p><p>Douglas Cumming, Sofia Johan and Ikenna Uzuegbunam</p><p>2. Regional determinants of poverty alleviation through entrepreneurship in China</p><p>Song Lin, Christoph Winkler, Shanshan Wang and Hui Chen</p><p>3. Uncovering the scaling of innovations developed by grassroots entrepreneurs in low-income settings</p><p>Marleen Wierenga</p><p>4. Entrepreneurial aspirations and poverty reduction: the role of institutional context</p><p>Sanjay Goel and Ranjan Karri</p><p>5. Untangling the effects of entrepreneurial opportunity on the performance of peasant entrepreneurship: the moderating roles of entrepreneurial effort and regional poverty level</p><p>Aiqi Wu, Di Song and Yang Yang</p><p>6. An exploratory study of entrepreneurs in impoverished communities: when institutional factors and individual characteristics result in non-productive entrepreneurship</p><p>Stelvia Matos and Jeremy Hall</p><p>7. Call the midwife! Business incubators as entrepreneurial enablers in developing economies</p><p>Helen Haugh</p><p>8. Crafting markets and fostering entrepreneurship within underserved communities: social ventures and clean energy provision in Asia</p><p>Sanjay Jain and James Koch</p><p>9. Climbing the poverty ladder: the role of entrepreneurship and gender in alleviating poverty in transition economies</p><p>Julia Korosteleva and Paulina Stępień-Baig</p><p>10. Trust, poverty, and subjective wellbeing among Chinese entrepreneurs</p><p>Yiyi Su, Shaker A. Zahra, Rui Li and Di Fan</p>