Lifestyle entrepreneurs are recognized as important actors in tourism economies, particularly through their locally embedded practices, personal values, and contributions to distinctive visitor experiences. However, the relationships between lifestyle-oriented entrepreneurial characteristics, local practices, community integration, and innovation orientation remain empirically underexplored. The empirical model tests how opportunity-oriented entrepreneurial identity, local hiring, local business collaboration, local supply, and community integration are associated with self-reported innovation orientation. Findings show that opportunity-oriented entrepreneurial identity is strongly and positively associated with self-reported innovation orientation. Local hiring and local business collaboration are positively associated with community integration. The study contributes by offering a more precise account of how an opportunity-oriented identity is related to innovation orientation among small tourism entrepreneurs with lifestyle-oriented profiles. The findings should be interpreted as applying to this purposive sample and to self-reported innovation orientation, rather than to objectively measured innovation outputs or confirmed community development outcomes.

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Lifestyle entrepreneurship,Tourism entrepreneurship,Opportunity-oriented identity,Innovation orientation,Community integration

• Economics and Business - Social Sciences