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Abstract

A growing number of research studies focuses on lifestyle entrepreneurs in the tourism industry. Lifestyle entrepreneurs often start their business due to the fact that they want to make business of their hobby or they want to create a certain quality of life by living in a specific place. Previous studies argue that lifestyle entrepreneurs are often motivated by non-economic goals. Nature based businesses includes traditional businesses like agriculture and forestry but also new emerging businesses that are based on nature?s resources like tourism. In rural areas, these type of tourism business are the most important incomes and therefore also of high importance concerning business development. The aim is to explore the tourism entrepreneurs? point of view of their lifestyle and business within nature based businesses in rural areas. The study was conducted with a qualitative approach. 17 different cases was studied from autumn 2015 until autumn 2016. The cases consisted of micro tourism companies within nature based businesses situated in the rural county of Jämtland in Sweden. The data was collected through semistructured interviews, observations and written materials. The result from this study show that there is several difference between tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs in rural areas with nature based businesses. We have identified four types of tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs that have different motives for running their businesses. The results also show that depending on what kind of tourism entrepreneur they focus differently on their nature based businesses. Many of the lifestyle entrepreneurs are focusing on finding several different types of income to spread the risk and also obtain growth. We could also see that traditional entrepreneurs within nature based businesses prefer to focus on the main income which often was more traditional products and services rather than tourism. The tourism lifestyle entrepreneurs therefore seem to try more different types of businesses and appear more open minded to create and innovate new products and services.

Projects

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