Necessity entrepreneurship is broadly understood as the identifying and seizing of business opportunities to address basic needs such as food and shelter. This volume proposes new ways of seeing, theorizing, and researching necessity entrepreneurship.

Scholars from across the management field expand our collective understanding, presenting necessity entrepreneurship not just as an economic process but as a cluster of cognitive, communal, and institutional processes aimed at coping with various dimensions of necessity. Challenging and revising foundational assumptions underlying prior necessity entrepreneurship research, chapters unpack necessity entrepreneurs’ inhabited cognitive processes, highlighting community-level insights on necessity entrepreneurship beyond the individual-level perspective that still dominates many necessity entrepreneurship studies.

This volume showcases novel theoretical framework and methodological approaches, ranging from quantitative measurement through artificial intelligence-based methods of visualization to qualitative-interpretative accounts, preparing the next stage of necessity entrepreneurship studies.

Sophie Bacq is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship and Coca-Cola Foundation Chair in Sustainable Development at IMD, Switzerland.

Katrin M. Smolka is Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK.

Angelique F. Slade Shantz is Associate Professor of Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Management, University of Alberta, Canada.

Pursey P.M.A.R. Heugens is Professor of Organization Theory at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, The Netherlands.