Start-up Communities as Communities of Practice: Shining a Light on Geographical Scale and Membership

Abstract

The development of start-up communities is seen as critical to the successful development of entrepreneurship in a region. However, it remains unclear what exactly start-up communities are and how they can be facilitated. Ambiguity concerning the geographical scale and membership of start-up communities leads to different conceptualisations. In this paper, we apply communities of practice (CoP) theory to understand how conceptualisations of start-up communities work and how they can be facilitated. To this end, we qualitatively study start-up communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra, Australia. Our results show that start-up communities that are confined to a particular workspace strongly resemble a CoP. Furthermore, many elements of CoPs can also be found in regional start-up communities. Finally, we find that workspace communities have more direct and top-down facilitation activities, while regional start-up communities have more indirect and bottom-up facilitation activities.