Digital Circumvention as a Means to Overcome Geographic Limitations: Defining the New Rural Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Abstract

Rural entrepreneurs have employed traditional marketing strategies to access markets, depended on news media, print literature, and word of mouth to gather information, utilized more traditional telecommunication modes to procure services not offered rurally, and relied on travel to expand their social network. These traditional enablers for rural entrepreneurs can now be circumvented vis-à-vis the digital affordances offered by new technologies. The developing literature on digital entrepreneurship reveals that digitization at the most rudimentary level is connecting entrepreneurial ecosystems and social networks (Autio, Nambisan, Llewellyn, & Wright, 2017). Yet, the theoretical foundations of these connections remains under-researched and the competitive relevance of rural entrepreneurs needs to be re-examined in light of the enabling affordances of digital technologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore the literature on how digital technologies are enabling rural entrepreneurs as their own unique subset of the global entrepreneurial ecosystem