The practice of entrepreneurship in the non-wood forest products sector: Support for innovation on private forest land

• NWFP innovation cases combine traditional knowledge with new societal demands.
• Businesses apply “slow growth and small risk” strategies.
• Entrepreneurs strongly rely on their own creativity, information and finances.
• Innovation systems are crucial for monetary support, consultation and networking.
• External innovation support is on low level with vast potentials for improvements.

The paper sets out to examine the characteristics of support for innovation processes in Non-Wood Forest Products (NWFP). The typical enterprises and start-ups which emerge in this sector tend to be small-scale and family owned. We claim that there is a large unused potential for NWFP to support rural development and increase incomes of land owners and rural enterprises. In this article, we study what makes selected and so far successful product innovations in NWFPs special and subsequently what were the factors that supported their development and marketing? These questions we study at hand of four empirical innovative case studies in four European rural areas. We come to the conclusion that the entrepreneurs show some common features in the ways they started their business. However, they have applied individual strategies for the realisation of their own ideas. In line with recommendations from recent literature on creating innovations, all of them have used some “external” support, but at very different levels: They range from monetary support and consultation of effective support organisations to personal non-monetary exchange-relationships in social networks within a communal area. Our results contribute to an understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour as a very individual and context-specific undertaking on the one hand and as a “universal” activity with common features and attributes on the other.