The Learning Community in the Field of Cultural Tourism

Learning is always dependent on space and place. Cultural spaces as realms of a tangible and intangible environment involve individual and shared experiences of the members of the local community. The purpose of our paper is to explore the challenges associated with enhancing entrepreneurial learning at the interface between learning and the entrepreneurial context (Harrison and Leitch, 2005). These are closely related to the question of how to design space – a place that learners want to return to because it engages them to participate with other people, rather than visiting a room. Such learning models already exist outside the business sphere. In art education the creation of a professional learning environment has a long tradition, and the linkage between entrepreneurship education and art education may add new understanding of entrepreneurial learning. The data for the study was collected both by interviewing and observing the participants of an entrepreneurship training progamme for nascent and practising micro firm business owners in cultural tourism. Our case study shows that small business enterprises offer variable novel ideas of how a local culture can be captured or converted into explicit knowledge and new values through a change of lifestyle and wellbeing. The process of becoming an entrepreneur was supported by inspiring an entrepreneur’s imagination and empathy and encouraging him/her to implement both implicit and explicit resources of the learning environment. This type of knowledge is deeply rooted in action, procedures, routines, commitment, ideals, values and emotions. The study clearly shows that new entrepreneurial propositions and innovative ideas are not created in a void environment but they are supported by an entrepreneur’s earlier experiences.