Entrepreneurship and innovation research has long been shaped by conventional models emphasizing high-growth technology ventures, linear innovation processes, and entrepreneurs portrayed as rational, opportunity-driven actors. While influential, these models capture only a restricted view of entrepreneurial and innovative realities and leave many forms of entrepreneurial action and innovation processes unexplored. This conference invites scholars to shift the focus toward unconventional entrepreneurship and innovation. By unconventional, we refer to entrepreneurial and innovative practices that emerge outside dominant models, standardized processes, and institutionalized settings. These practices are often informal, frugal, improvised, emotionally driven, and shaped by constraint, crisis, and uncertainty. Although widespread, they remain under-theorized and weakly recognized in mainstream research. This first edition aims to create a space for dialogue around these overlooked forms, including entrepreneurship and innovation in crisis situations, wartime and post-disaster contexts, and overseas or island territories, where unconventional dynamics remain particularly understudied.

This conference focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation as they unfold in practice, rather than as they are conventionally modeled. We invite contributions engaging with key debates in entrepreneurship and innovation research, including process perspectives, contextual embeddedness, temporality, emotions and intuition, and non-linear dynamics, through topics such as:

• Unconventional forms of entrepreneurship, such as informal, constrained, underground, resilient, or post-traumatic initiatives;
• Innovation processes that are non-linear, relying on bricolage, frugality, improvisation, intuition, emotions, or serendipity;
• Entrepreneurial trajectories shaped by failure or discontinuity, including unlikely or unexpected paths;
• Entrepreneurship and innovation in extreme or disrupted contexts, such as crises, disasters, conflicts, and island or peripheral territories;
• Informal or improvised collectives that generate hidden, frugal, or resilient forms of innovation;
• Alternative sustainability and financing practices that operate outside dominant institutional and financial frameworks.

The conference also welcomes work using processual, narrative, ethnographic, experimental, or other non-conventional methods, as well as contributions on unconventional education in entrepreneurship and innovation.