Ricerc@Sapienza

The main goal of the present explorative research is to shed light on the common features of the minor, not-mainstream forms of entrepreneurship (and innovation) reported in literature over the last years. We observe that unconventional entrepreneurship often goes by alternative labels, such as ethnic entrepreneurship, community entrepreneurship, minority entrepreneurship, student entrepreneurship. The relevance of these categories in world economies highlights the need to better understand their backgrounds, goals, and motivations, the origins of lack of opportunities they face, the meaning of business success, and the role played by social context. Therefore, looking at the `what¿ of entrepreneurship becomes focusing on `entrepreneuring¿ as efforts to bring about new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments. De-linking entrepreneurship actions from the sphere of formal commercial economy allows to challenge the dominant ideology of entrepreneurship as a form of capitalism and to reveal the manifold practices beyond entrepreneurship, especially for Immigrants and Students Entrepreneurship. Thus, bracketing together all the foregoing considerations on extant gaps in the literature, we formulate the following specific research questions:
RQ1 - What are the macro, meso, micro conditions promoting unconventional entrepreneurship?
RQ2 - How is the process of opportunity recognition and exploitation started and managed by immigrants and students¿ entrepreneurs?
RQ3 - How is the public discourse about unconventional entrepreneurship by immigrants and students entrepreneurs constructed in Italy?
Each research question aims to shed light on some specific aspects of these phenomena: determinants/ antecedents (RQ1), processes (RQ2), outcome and public discourses (RQ3).