Teacher entrepreneurial ecosystems: How local communities support teacher entrepreneurs

Abstract

Teacher entrepreneurs pursue innovative opportunities to create value for their students and colleagues; however, it is unclear how local communities enable teacher entrepreneurs and why some communities provide fertile ground for teacher entrepreneurship while others stifle teacher entrepreneurs. To address the limited understanding of how communities can support teacher entrepreneurship, this paper draws from entrepreneurial ecosystems research and the micro-foundations approach to develop a multi-level framework to explain the attributes of “teacher entrepreneurial ecosystems.” The main insight is that where teachers engage in entrepreneurship matters and that, in addition to teacher- and school-based characteristics, important contextual differences exist at the community-level in the depth of support for teacher entrepreneurs. Specifically, the theory explains how key differences in teacher entrepreneurial ecosystems influence teacher entrepreneurship and, in turn, how the activities of teacher entrepreneurs influence the diversity, coherence, and resilience of their ecosystems. The theory contributes by explaining how teacher entrepreneurial ecosystems function, motivating an agenda for studying teacher entrepreneurial ecosystems that catalyzes research at the entrepreneurial ecosystem and education interface, and generating insights that can help teachers and school administrators to harness their local communities and empower teacher entrepreneurs.