Community Innovation through Entrepreneurship: Grantmaking in Canadian Community Economic Development

Abstract

This paper examines the relationships among community innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge, and grantmaking in the field of community economic development. The paper assesses the experience of the Community Economic Development Technical Assistance Program (CEDTAP), a bilingual grantmaker operating in rural and urban Canada, in combining small-grant funding with knowledge management methods to support community innovation. The CEDTAP experience illustrates how the multiple roles played by individual entrepreneurs and the social entrepreneurship of the local CED organization combine to drive the innovation process. Mature CED organizations are found to pursue innovation in order to achieve performance gains to better achieve their mission. While information technology is of some interest to these groups, they are increasingly active in applying new production technologies to strengthen their business enterprises. The CEDTAP experience highlights the potential of grantmakers to enhance their impact and reach through such knowledge-management tools as electronic portals, action-research and mutual learning within thematic clusters of grantee projects. The paper calls for practitioners and scholars to better understand the nature of, and interrelationships among, community innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge and grantmaking in community economic development.

Keywords:

• community economic development
• entrepreneurship
• grantmaking
• innovation
• knowledge management
• social entrepreneurship