From principles to action: Community-based entrepreneurship in the Toquaht Nation

Abstract This article draws upon research undertaken in partnership with the Toquaht Nation, a Canadian First Nations community, which reveals how guiding principles that reflect Indigenous values, knowledge and heritage shape community-based entrepreneurial opportunity identification. Using a community-based participatory research approach, we leveraged insights across a range of methods, participants and points in time to co-create a decision support and impact evaluation system – grounded in the Toquaht people's vision of well-being and development – that is used by the Toquaht Nation to evaluate the potential and actual impacts of community-based entrepreneurial opportunities across multiple dimensions of well-being. By elaborating a notion of collective effectuation, the research demonstrates how a more explicit consideration of the social and cultural context of entrepreneurship can provide novel insights that enrich existing theories and paradigms, and highlights the complexities of the phenomena we collectively aim to study.