ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the investigation of the emergence of innovation and entrepreneurship in complex social systems, exemplarily in the context of community-based renewable energy. The nature of complexity applies to how our economic system works since it consists of the complex actions and interactions between individual entrepreneurs, national and international companies, whole societies and the politics governing them. The concept of community-based renewable energy has theoretically and practically been used to define small-scale and local renewable energy-generating social groups, which hold high degrees of project ownership and collective benefits. Organisational proximity originates from socio-hierarchical structures within organisations such as administration or firms, whereas social proximity arises through relations built upon social ties such as friendship or family relationships. Innovation represents a notion that implicates connotations of improvement, renewal and technological or social progress. The entrepreneurial thinking in the municipality was complemented by local people’s willingness to socially and economically invest in local companies, to reinvest in them and the municipality.
