Platform-enabled entrepreneurship provides a novel avenue for poverty alleviation in rural communities. However, the transformation of marginalized communities into ecosystems capable of supporting this new business model in a digital context remains underexplored. Using a qualitative case study of three representative Taobao Villages, this study identifies an evolutionary process of entrepreneurial transformation comprising three stages: institutional exploration, institutional adjustment, and institutional legitimation. Entrepreneurs play a central role in this process, engaging in four types of institutional work – external work, internal work, identity work, and legitimation work – to reconstruct and adapt rural communities to the demands of platform-enabled business models. By uncovering the entrepreneurial dynamics underpinning digital poverty reduction, this study contributes to the literature on digital poverty entrepreneurship, while advancing insights into platform-enabled entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial embeddedness perspective.
