Abstract
Peripheral destinations are increasingly asked to ‘thrive’ through tourism in ways that deliver social inclusion, cultural revitalisation, and long-term territorial sustainability, yet we still know relatively little about how such outcomes are accomplished in practice by early-stage ventures under chronic scarcity. This developmental paper advances a process perspective on regenerative tourism entrepreneurship by integrating tourism social entrepreneurship and regenerative tourism with place-based embeddedness and ecosystem thinking, and by mobilising entrepreneurial bricolage and dynamic capabilities as complementary process lenses. Empirically, the paper develops a longitudinal interpretive single-case study of Molise WoW, a youth-led tourism cooperative founded in 2022 in Italy’s Molise region, with earlier incubation through cultural associations (2015–2019). Drawing on publicly available materials and an emerging case database, we outline an event-based narrative and preliminary mechanism expectations about how improvisational resource recombination can be stabilised into sensing–seizing–reconfiguring capabilities that support regenerative initiatives (including the recent ‘Molise SPOPOLA’ platform). The study is in progress: interviews and extended observations are scheduled and the analytic model will be refined through abductive process tracing. We seek feedback on (i) the conceptual integration of regeneration, embeddedness and start-up conditions, (ii) operationalising ‘regenerative outcomes’ at venture and place levels, and (iii) strengthening the empirical strategy for causal process explanations.