The Making of the Urban Entrepreneur

Book excerpt: Pressures on infrastructure--due to growing urban populations, the ubiquity of new technologies, and collaborative business models--are fostering a new form of entrepreneurship focused on addressing quality of life in cities. Urban entrepreneurs are challenging the logic of formal market structures, forcing us to re-frame our thinking around the interactions between place, individuals, institutions, and the resulting innovative outcomes. Urban entrepreneurs--operating at the neighborhood, city, and global levels--are developing alternative forms of private-public-people partnerships and unique business strategies.