Opportunity-oriented entrepreneurial identity and innovation orientation in lifestyle-oriented tourism ventures

Abstract

Lifestyle entrepreneurs are recognized as important actors in tourism economies, particularly through their locally embedded practices, personal values, and contributions to distinctive visitor experiences. However, the relationships between lifestyle-oriented entrepreneurial characteristics, local practices, community integration, and innovation orientation remain empirically underexplored. The empirical model tests how opportunity-oriented entrepreneurial identity, local hiring, local business collaboration, local supply, and community integration are associated with self-reported innovation orientation. Findings show that opportunity-oriented entrepreneurial identity is strongly and positively associated with self-reported innovation orientation. Local hiring and local business collaboration are positively associated with community integration. The study contributes by offering a more precise account of how an opportunity-oriented identity is related to innovation orientation among small tourism entrepreneurs with lifestyle-oriented profiles. The findings should be interpreted as applying to this purposive sample and to self-reported innovation orientation, rather than to objectively measured innovation outputs or confirmed community development outcomes.