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).
Mainstream literature often does not recognize that there is an inherent tension between normative views of entrepreneurship (i.e., entrepreneurship as it should be) and entrepreneurship practice (i.e., entrepreneurship as it is) (Ojo et al., 2013). Tying the individual - to the macro-level, this calls for acknowledging the hegemonic discourses developed by governments and media about entrepreneurship. As underlined by several authors, entrepreneurship in Western societies has been characterized by a grand narrative highlighting its role in delivering economic results and providing a base for national growth and innovation, thus building a hegemonic discourse of the importance of entrepreneurship and the appropriateness of its promotion for everyone (Verduijn and Essers, 2013; Srensen, 2008; Tedmanson et al., 2012). This relates to the importance of the context in which entrepreneurial actions take place. In fact, although entrepreneurship always emerges from a particular context, theoretical development in entrepreneurship research has focused on finding ¿general laws¿ which might transcend context, whereas entrepreneurship should be approached as a highly context-dependent process, embedded in social, cultural, and institutional contexts (Hjorth et al., 2008).
Instead, from a contextual perspective, entrepreneurship is manifest in manifold locations comprising business (e.g., market, industry), social (e.g., networks, households), spatial (e.g., region, countries, communities and neighbourhoods), and institutional (e.g., culture and society; political and economic systems) dimensions. In addition, a contextual perspective draws attention to temporal and historical contexts influencing the nature and extent of today¿s entrepreneurship and its changes over time (Welter, 2011).
Miller and Miller (2017) put emphasis on resilience of individuals, in terms of courage and creativity, as a funnel for innovation in variously characterized entrepreneurial settings.
Though, we have found that prior scholars have not properly investigated innovation in unconventional entrepreneurship yet. Perhaps, the retrieved research gap could be explained by the absolute novelty of the topic. Thus, we can conclude that this stream is at a very embryonic stage.
The study aims to tackle those gaps by focusing on determinants and modes of innovation in unconventional entrepreneurship. Closely associated to the contextual nature of entrepreneurial endeavors, mainstream entrepreneurship tradition is very much grounded in a fixing of constructs and entities that are isolated and studied in relation to one another (Hjorth et al., 2015), driven by the questionable task of finding general laws and causal, linear models that link entrepreneurial antecedents to outcomes. Approaching the how of unconventional entrepreneurship requires instead a process approach, which comes ¿in extended, imbricated models and are happily loosened in extenuating circumstance¿ (Hjorth et al., 2015, p. 600), allowing to investigate entrepreneuring as a phenomenon-driven, complex, and multi-layered topic. This has implications about the transdisciplinary nature of entrepreneurship research, which could draw more on social and human sciences such as sociology, anthropology, and philosophy rather than only business administration, economics, or psychology (Hjorth et al., 2008).