A research-anchored e-entrepreneurship empowerment approach to building a smart community

Abstract

From its inception just over three decades ago, the Siyabuswa Educational Improvement and Development Trust (SEIDET) believed that to achieve its goals, it needed to put research and development at the center of its strategic and operational plans. For this reason, it has collaborated with universities and research institutes in all its programs¿bursaries for its students, career guidance, Seidet students project, UniSchool and ICT introduction, visits by international professors, research, and special projects. It understood that in efforts to respond to ongoing community needs, there will always be unanswered questions that would be of interest to the research community. The research-anchored e-entrepreneurship empowerment approach to the development of smart communities that we propose in this chapter is informed by this belief, understanding, and practice. Drawing from a number of case studies, examples, and projects reported in the literature and comparing these to the lived experiences and lessons from our involvement in Seidet, we argue and illustrate in this chapter that one way to build a smart community is to adopt a research-anchored, e-entrepreneurship empowerment approach. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. Related work and literature is presented next, followed by some examples used elsewhere on how smart communities could be built. The digital village concept spawned from entrepreneurship training and related ICT interventions is presented next, after which our key argument for a research-anchored e-entrepreneurship empowerment as an approach to development of a smart community is presented. The chapter ends with a concluding discussion.