Purdue Agribusiness Review, Volume 1, Issue 3
Experts in the business world have a lot to say about entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mindset. Textbooks. Articles in Forbes or the Harvard Business Review. Even the paperbacks stacked next to the neck pillows in the airport bookstore. And yet, many of them seem to share the same blind spot. Too often, they assume entrepreneurs are driven by the pursuit of wealth. Some are, but many are chasing something else entirely. Neither the business school curriculum nor the business shelves at the bookstore have much to say about it.
I started noticing the gap while building a syllabus for the entrepreneurship classes I teach at the University of Vermont. My own research background is in regional economics, where entrepreneurship shows up as an outcome, not a motivation. My papers typically ask some version of the same question: How does X affect Y? Across these studies, X varies widely: broadband investment, highway ramp proximity, the rollout of some new state program. But more often than not, Y is measured as some form of local entrepreneurship. Do we see more startups? Do businesses expand? Does the local business community change shape?
None of that research prepared me for what I found once I started reading to teach the subject instead of just studying its outcomes.
Why some entrepreneurs stay put
Wealth explains much of the pull toward entrepreneurship. It is foundational to the entrepreneurial mindset. You don’t need a college professor to tell you that people willing to put skin in the game are usually reaching for something beyond the options currently available to them.
But wealth does not explain all of it. A meaningful share of entrepreneurs are chasing something else entirely. Call it place attachment. Call it a commitment to community. Whatever the label, it is a motivation that rarely makes it into the textbook.
This is not exclusively a rural phenomenon, but it is much more prevalent in remote, often stagnant or declining places. In such communities, there is often a deep awareness that the sorts of economic opportunities available in the big city are not coming to small-town America any time soon. Staying still means something. For a lot of people, staying rooted near family and community is worth more than the upside of a bigger paycheck somewhere else.
The nonfinancial value of local business
Let’s set aside the balance sheet for a moment and consider a few things that community-centered entrepreneurship can accomplish.
It creates jobs for people who may otherwise have few options. A teenager busing tables at the diner is building a work history. A single parent behind the counter at the hardware store is keeping a paycheck coming without a two-hour commute. These jobs rarely show up in a headline about economic development. They matter anyway.
It builds social capital. The bar, the diner and the barbershop function as “third places,” spaces that are neither home nor work. These are the spots where a rural town holds its conversations, settles its arguments, and keeps its residents feeling like they belong to something (Van Leuven et al., 2025). Lose the local businesses, and you might just lose the third places along with them.
Community-centered entrepreneurship also anchors the local economy (Van Leuven et al., 2026). Just not in the way most people picture an anchor. Forget the image of one large employer carrying the whole town on its payroll, a 70-yard touchdown pass that wins the game in a single play. A deep bench of small, financially stable, locally embedded entrepreneurs looks more like a team that keeps converting on fourth-and-short. No single business accounts for the win. The sum of them does.
Agribusiness, of all fields, ought to remember this best. Rural roots and a commitment to place are baked into the profession. But the field covers a lot of ground. Marketing. Risk management. Agronomy. Farm finance. All of that range can crowd out attention to the rest of the rural economy, the essential businesses operating just off the farm (Spell et al., 2023).
What the literature already says
Despite this blind spot, none of this is new. Scholars have been writing about the “lifestyle entrepreneur,” someone who chooses stability and meaning over rapid growth, for decades (Fortunato, 2014; Marcketti et al., 2006). Farm producers themselves have, in many instances, turned to opportunities such as agritourism and value-added agriculture (McElwee, 2006) to diversify their income sources and stay locally rooted, even as decades of industry consolidation and globalized trade have thinned the number of farms that can survive on production alone.
Research on rural entrepreneurship has its own champions too. Regional scientists like Tessa Conroy and Sarah Low (Conroy & Low, 2022; Conroy et al., 2017) have written extensively about the factors that contribute to healthy rural business ecosystems, often focusing on broadband, access to capital, and female-led entrepreneurship. A forthcoming special issue of Small Business Economics is devoted entirely to rural entrepreneurship theory and practice.
While these are not isolated voices, they remain the exception. Most entrepreneurship curricula, and most of the popular press coverage surrounding them, lean toward the high-growth, often venture-backed, success story.
That emphasis makes some sense. A plurality of entrepreneurs may be locally rooted and stable rather than growth oriented. But they still represent a comparatively small share of the dollars generated by the national and global startup economy. Investors chase the outliers because the outliers are where the returns live.
Even so, the less glamorous, more durable side of entrepreneurship deserves its own recognition. It deserves credit for the social capital it builds. It deserves credit for the jobs it creates when other options are scarce. And, more than anything, it deserves recognition for the stability it lends to communities that cannot count on a major employer to save them.
A broader definition of entrepreneurship
It’s fine if the word “startup” makes your mind jump to a shiny new app on your phone’s home screen or to TV and movies like Silicon Valley and The Social Network. Those stories are a real part of our collective imagination around entrepreneurship. American tech success stories have driven a sizable share of economic growth over the past few decades.
But don’t stop there. Think about the restaurant where practically half the local high school seems to work a shift after class. Think about your neighbor’s plumbing van parked out front. Its paint has faded, but the tools inside are fully paid off, ready to fix your water heater on the coldest night of the year. Think about the barbers and stylists, the lawyers and accountants, the veterinarians and family doctors, the hardware store and the feed store, and the dozens of other small business owners nobody ever puts on the evening news.
They are the lifeblood of rural communities. Their modest P&L statements will not make the next edition of an entrepreneurship textbook, but that does not make them any less representative of what an entrepreneur actually is.
The next time someone asks what business schools get wrong about entrepreneurship, the answer will not be in the numbers. It will be in the neighbors we forgot to count.
References
Belitski, M., Monsen, E., Peake, W., & Zollet, S. (Eds.). (Forthcoming). Rural entrepreneurship theory and practice [Special issue]. Small Business Economics.
Conroy, T., & Low, S. A. (2022). Opportunity, necessity, and no one in the middle: A closer look at small, rural, and female‐led entrepreneurship in the United States. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 44(1), 162-196.
Conroy, T., Low, S. A., & Weiler, S. (2017). Fueling job engines: Impacts of small business loans on establishment births in metropolitan and nonmetro counties. Contemporary Economic Policy, 35(3), 578-595.
Fortunato, M. W. P. (2014). Supporting rural entrepreneurship: a review of conceptual developments from research to practice. Community Development, 45(4), 387-408.
Marcketti, S. B., Niehm, L. S., & Fuloria, R. (2006). An exploratory study of lifestyle entrepreneurship and its relationship to life quality. Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal, 34(3), 241-259.
McElwee, G. (2006). Farmers as entrepreneurs: developing competitive skills. Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship, 11(03), 187-206.
Spell, A., Jacobs, K., Low, S., & Krohn, J. (2023). The importance of off-farm income to the agricultural economy.
Van Leuven, A. J., Hill, E., & Low, S. A. (2026). The value of economic and community development anchors. Economic Development Quarterly, 40(1), 114-122.
Van Leuven, A. J. (2025). The Importance of Third Places in Rural Communities. Choices 40(4) 1-9.
About the Center for Food and Agricultural Business
Founded in 1986, the Purdue University Center for Food and Agricultural Business is celebrating 40 years of working with the agribusiness industry to develop leaders and inform better decision-making. Housed within Purdue’s Department of Agricultural Economics, the center connects faculty expertise with the practical challenges facing food and agricultural companies.
The center delivers professional development programs, industry research and graduate education designed specifically for agribusiness professionals. Offerings include open-enrollment workshops, custom corporate training and the MS-MBA in Food and Agribusiness Management, a dual-degree program developed with industry for working professionals.
Through its research and publications – including the Purdue Agribusiness Review – the center shares industry insights from Purdue faculty and collaborators to help agribusiness leaders navigate change and make more informed strategic decisions.
