11751: Entrepreneurial Ingenuity, Social Impact, and Civic Wealth Creation (session 26134)

We examine how people perceive the influence of entrepreneurial ingenuity on their ability to pursue economic, social, and environmental impact. Entrepreneurial ingenuity emphasizes the ability to use imaginative problem solving to create innovative new ventures and value within constraints while voluntarily adopting social and environmental responsibility. By collaborating with public high schools that provide entrepreneurship education to youth in resource-constrained communities, we trained high schoolers’ mothers in entrepreneurial ingenuity. Using a qualitative approach guided by grounded theory, we analyzed interviews with these entrepreneurial women. We find that entrepreneurial ingenuity training tends to help people (1) envision an improved view of their abilities as an entrepreneur, (2) recognize their role in social responsibility and environmental sustainability in a community, and (3) identify inter-generational entrepreneurship and impact actions. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial ingenuity can help foster civic wealth creation, connecting the entrepreneurial ingenuity and civic wealth creation perspectives.

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