Regional Sharing-Economy Entrepreneurs and the Diversity of their Business Models

Entrepreneurship in the sharing economy is a prototypical global phenomenon, while the sharing economy is present across various economic sectors, including regional economies. Against the backdrop of this observation, the present chapter addresses the issue of regional sharing-economy entrepreneurs. It investigates the questions of what the entrepreneurial characteristics of applied business models with such regional sharing-economy entrepreneurs are and which diversity of business models exists with them. An exploratory case study of four Norwegian sharing-economy start-up businesses is presented to shed light on these questions. The study finds that the four cases represent variants of regional sharing-economy entrepreneurs that incorporate different elements of the business model features discussed in the literature but differ with regard to their viability. We argue that complementarities exist between their business models, which creates the diversity of regional entrepreneurship in the platform-based sharing economy.