The best of both worlds: how rural entrepreneurs use placial embeddedness and strategic networks to create opportunities

Entrepreneurial activities are strongly influenced by the context in which they occur. It is therefore imperative to understand how different contexts enable entrepreneurs to create opportunities. In this paper, we focus on the spatial context of rural entrepreneurs and explore how the rural context impacts on their opportunity creation. Based on a multiple case study, we find that rural entrepreneurs mix what we refer to as placial embeddedness – an intimate knowledge of and concern for the place – with strategically built non-local networks, i.e. the best of two worlds. Notably, the entrepreneurs seek to exhaust the localized resource base before seeking out non-local resources. Our findings thus contribute to our understanding of entrepreneurship in context and challenge future research to explore how different forms of contexts are bridged in different settings to create varieties of entrepreneurial activities.