Citizen Engagement and Entrepreneurship : Implications for Sustainable Tourism Development

Abstract

Research has not investigated the use of competitions-hackathons as a citizen engagement tool to motivate and activate citizen’s engagement in entrepreneurship driving sustainable tourism development. This paper fills in this gap by using the SHARE Challenge as a case study. SHARE is a competition-based crowdsourcing project launched by the Government of South Australia aiming to engage citizens in sharing economy entrepreneurial ventures. The competition received 88 eligible ideas from different stakeholders, and the study conducted a content analyses of these ideas for investigating the profile of the citizens and the type of the sharing economy ideas that were inspired by the SHARE. Tourism was found to be the sector attracting most of the submitted ideas for starting-up a sharing economy entrepreneurial venture aiming to make sustainable use of tourism resources. The findings provide evidence on how SHARE has ‘educated’, inspired, and activated the citizens to engage in sustainable entrepreneurship.