ABSTRACT
This chapter is intended to unpack the complex relationship between entrepreneurs and their communities and environments. It examines a wide variety of existing models in the literature that each takes a different perspective on how entrepreneurs interact, and how entrepreneurship can best be supported locally. The chapter provides meta-analysis of existing entrepreneurial community and ecosystem models, highlights their similarities and differences, and how these models can inform the field's thinking about how the many individual, social, institutional, psychological, cultural, and community-based pieces of the entrepreneurship puzzle fit together. H. E. Aldrich examined entrepreneurship through an "ecological" lens examining spatial factors contributing to difference in firm formation rates. A diverse cross-section of integrated models and frameworks that have been used to make sense of the messiness of entrepreneurship across geographic space, and the differential features that appear to drive entrepreneurship in some areas, while inhibiting it in others is discussed.
