Viva Ona Bartkus

How can social intermediaries use entrepreneurship as a tool to bring together fragmented communities? In the Spring of 2019, our co-author team embarked on a journey to explore this question in the context of rural Colombia, where decades of conflict, narcotrafficking, and poverty have left many communities disconnected despite their geographic proximity.

INTRODUCTION A great deal of research has outlined the promise of entrepreneurship as an effective tool to reduce poverty (see Sutter et al., 2019 for a review). In particular, efforts to cultivate entrepreneurship in poverty settings can unlock resources to overcome institutional voids (Webb et al., 2010) and facilitate the identification of novel opportunities (Hart and Christensen, 2002; Seelos and Mair, 2007; Sutter et al., 2019).

The authors (Bartkus, Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame; and Block, the George M. Cormie Chair of Management in the Alberta School of Business) write about the applicability of lessons learned in war zones and other extreme environments for today’s business challenges.