Shoals Shift: An Ecosystem Transformation Success Story
In the Muscle Shoals region of North Alabama, the University of North Alabama (UNA) and its partners launched the Shoals Shift Project to address challenges such as generational poverty and low educational attainment.
Rather than “waiting,” the collaborative team consciously embraced an approach of “doing, not waiting.” They applied Strategic Doing to uncover hidden assets within the region and link and leverage them to define new opportunities.
For instance, they launched a business plan competition without secured funding, tapping their networks to raise the necessary capital quickly.
This commitment to action, even in the face of uncertainty, strengthened their ecosystem and enabled continuous progress. Strategic Doing training became a regular practice, inspiring community collaboration based on shared assets and helping to build a new narrative for the region.
Abstract: Market failure has been cited as a major cause of environmental degradation due to business activity. Yet entrepreneurs often play an active role in tackling environmental issues and developing sustainable solutions for them. Whereas a rising literature on sustainable entrepreneurship seeks to investigate how they do this, rigorous microfoundations for such investigations do not yet exist. With a view to developing such microfoundations, we reanalyzed Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s historical case study of governance structures for managing water basins in the Los Angeles area. Our analysis allowed us to bring together Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development framework and effectuation to show how effectual entrepreneurs transform market failures into sustainable solutions by self selecting stakeholders. The resulting integrated model of collective action serves both as a practical guide for entrepreneurs seeking to tackle sustainability issues and as a theoretical framework for researchers to develop rigorous microfoundations for future empirical work.
