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Start‐up Communities as Communities of Practice: Shining a Light on Geographical Scale and Membership
Author(s) -
van Weele Marijn A.,
Steinz Henk J.,
van Rijnsoever Frank J.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.766
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1467-9663
pISSN - 0040-747X
DOI - 10.1111/tesg.12277
Subject(s) - facilitation , ambiguity , workspace , scale (ratio) , start up , entrepreneurship , public relations , economic geography , work (physics) , sociology , geography , political science , management , business , computer science , engineering , economics , mechanical engineering , business administration , cartography , artificial intelligence , robot , law , programming language
The development of start‐up communities is seen as critical to the successful development of entrepreneurship in a region. However, it remains unclear what exactly start‐up communities are and how they can be facilitated. Ambiguity concerning the geographical scale and membership of start‐up communities leads to different conceptualisations. In this paper, we apply communities of practice (CoP) theory to understand how conceptualisations of start‐up communities work and how they can be facilitated. To this end, we qualitatively study start‐up communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, Australia. Our results show that start‐up communities that are confined to a particular workspace strongly resemble a CoP. Furthermore, many elements of CoPs can also be found in regional start‐up communities. Finally, we find that workspace communities have more direct and top‐down facilitation activities, while regional start‐up communities have more indirect and bottom‐up facilitation activities.