From Project to Venture: Facilitating Co-Operation and Entrepreneurshipin Rural Tourism

Visit Village is a newly established Swedish cooperative rural tourism venture. It is a novel approach to rural tourism development that is designed to facilitate entrepreneurship, collaboration, and local participation. The guiding notion is that an inclusive and cooperative structure promotes the responsible use of locally available resources and the creation of attractive value propositions that are grounded in the unique features of the place. The Visit Village model was developed in a project by Coompanion Dalarna, a non-profit consultancy organisation, Visit Dalarna, the regional DMO, and local actors from four Swedish villages. This study is part of ongoing research that has been closely following the Visit Village project for nearly three years. This particular paper is concerned with the process that led to the formation of this collaborative venture, and it applies the Civic Wealth Creation (CWC) theoretical framework for stakeholder engagement (Lumpkin & Bacq, 2019) to explore interactions as a means to facilitate entrepreneurship. CWC is a stakeholder theory that provides a framework for studying interactions between the local community, commercial enterprises and supporting regimes (enabling organisations and the public sector) to create positive social change, economic well-being and community wealth. CWC is concerned with the entrepreneurial ecosystem and mechanisms such as resource mobilisation, collaborative innovation and engaged participation (Bailey & Lumpkin,2023). The CWC theory is particularly relevant in the context of Visit Village, considering Coompanion’s extensive role as the project’s leader and initiator and the explicit intention to involve the local community in the Visit Village enterprise. Moreover, the CWC framework can be pertinent for rural and community-based tourism research as it focuses on local processes of creating entrepreneurial communities and opportunities, developing a shared vision and the exaptation of locally available resources (Dowin Kennedy, 2021). This exploratory qualitative research case study focuses on the project that led to the formation of the Visit Village venture. Close collaboration with the project’s leaders and steering committee gave me an exceptional opportunity to observe entrepreneurial processes as they happen. Since its start in January 2021, I have regularly attended many project activities, including workshops and steering group meetings. In addition, the close collaborati