Migrant Entrepreneurship Enablers: From Chance Encounters to Community Development

This article explores the underexamined role of personal enablers in migrant entrepreneurship. Drawing on timeline interviews, the study relays the importance of entrepreneur enablers in migrants’ business endeavours over time, ranging from coincidental and ephemeral encounters to the development of supportive communities. In the absence of accessible business support structures, the role of chance in migrants’ entrepreneurial trajectories increases, leading migrants to become self-employed, often against the grain of their own expectations or those of their inner circle of contacts or the wider society. The timeline interviews are a helpful method to capture how particular people, in conjunction with broader societal and smaller personal developments, influence entrepreneurial choices and progression over time. The study adds a dynamic and agentic perspective to migrant entrepreneurship literature underlining the importance of personal enablers to support migrant entrepreneurial developments over time.