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Abstract

A pioneering segment of economic development practitioners, entrepreneurs, and scholars have advocated moving away from industrial recruitment and attraction programs to instead focus on designing vibrant systems for starting and growing businesses as a strategic approach for creating jobs, affluence, and community vitality. This article considers the lessons learned from “the largest focus group in economic development”—the 2016 Growing Entrepreneurial Communities Summit. The findings from this study are among the first to report the input from a broad spectrum of thought leaders including entrepreneurs, practitioner experts, and academics on creating entrepreneurial communities reflecting a strong consensus on processes and the common barriers to creating entrepreneurial communities as well as a rich sample of specific strategies deployed in this pursuit.

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