Solving societal challenges manifesting at the local level requires concerted efforts involving communities, enterprises, and support organizations. The process unfolding around these collaborations is called civic wealth creation (CWC)—defined as “the generation of social, economic, and communal endowments that benefit local communities". While research has repeatedly highlighted the potential of community entrepreneurship to generate civic wealth, it has not explored how this potential can be explained or leveraged. In this paper, we delineate four strategic orientations that characterize community entrepreneurship (i.e., holisticness, embeddedness, inclusiveness, and collectiveness) and describe practices used to enact these strategies along a spectrum from low to high. We theorize how, through the enactment of these four strategic orientations, community entrepreneurship can trigger a reinforcing process of CWC. Furthermore, by positioning community entrepreneurship as a strategic endeavor, we discuss how diverse types of organizations can, in different combinations and to varying degrees, capitalize on community entrepreneurship strategic orientations, thereby unleashing their potential to create civic wealth. Our paper makes important contributions to the literature on community entrepreneurship and CWC but is equally relevant to a broader audience of entrepreneurship and organization scholars and practitioners interested in investigating the richness of entrepreneurial endeavors for society.
