Entrepreneurship and innovation: Who is forgotten?

Innovation and entrepreneurship constitute the indispensable ingredients in contemporary capitalism, yet a large proportion of them occurs within the bulk ‘iceberg’ of economy hidden underneath the water. This chapter critically examines the notion of spatial peripherality and social marginality in the process of innovation-driven capitalism. By an introductory illustration on the manifold definition of the peripheral in the literature, the chapter focuses on three ‘forgotten’ places and social groups that received insufficient attention in mainstream innovation studies, namely the peripheral regions, migrant entrepreneurs, and participants in the informal sector. By critically reviewing the innovation and entrepreneurship dynamics among them, it argues that it is the numerous small and medium-sized business operating in the peripheral regions, in the immigrant entrepreneurial communities, and in the Southern informal sector, that sustain and confront the mainstream innovation. It concludes that the desires of these three groups to link up with the outside world exist in parallel with strong commitment to their own localities and communities characterized by the everyday struggle of selection and resistance to mainstream capitalist practices. This could come in the form of dependence/interdependence as well as reciprocity/tension, which is subject to technological cycles, geopolitical complexities and domestic policy narratives. Hence, the investigation on the innovation dynamics within the peripheral capitalism transcends the neoliberal leitmotif, and comes down to a deeper issue of contested political economy and power struggle of everyday practices.