Although there is wide recognition of the importance of entrepreneurship for generating societal impact, entrepreneurial activities alone rarely achieve a positive impact without the engagement of communities. To date, however, entrepreneurship researchers have tended to overlook the importance of community for creating societal impact through entrepreneurship, and lack a comprehensive understanding of the nature and roles of communities. To address this, we conduct a systematic review of the literature published in 51 journals across the Management and Entrepreneurship, Economic Development/Community Development, Economic Geography and Regional Science, Energy, and Public Administration disciplines that makes three contributions. First, it identifies a new typology of community and proposes a comprehensive framework of roles through which societal impact is created by entrepreneurship for, in, with, enabled by, and driven by communities. Second, it demonstrates that the key to understanding how community relates to societal impact creation is to jointly account for both its type(s) and role(s). By linking community types and roles, the findings also suggest a theoretical contribution based on the relationship between the degree of formalization of a community type, and the degree of agency that a community role enacts. Third, the review underscores that communities are not just static settings but can also be dynamic actors in efforts to use entrepreneurship to create societal impact. Our cross-disciplinary review highlights trends and gaps in the extant literature and provides researchers with an evidence-based research agenda to guide future inquiry on this vital topic.

尽管人们普遍认识到创业对产生社会影响的重要性，但如果没有社区的参与，创业活动本身很少能产生积极影响。然而，迄今为止，创业研究人员往往忽视了社区通过创业创造社会影响的重要性，对社区的性质和作用缺乏全面的了解。为了解决这个问题，我们对发表在管理与创业、经济发展/社区发展、经济地理学和区域科学、能源和公共管理学科的 51 种期刊上的文献进行了系统评价，这些学科做出了三项贡献。第一的，为、在、与、由社区支持和驱动。其次，它表明理解社区如何与社会影响创造相关的关键是共同考虑其类型和角色。通过将社区类型和角色联系起来，研究结果还提出了基于社区类型的正规化程度与社区角色制定的代理程度之间关系的理论贡献。第三，审查强调社区不仅是静态环境，还可以成为努力利用企业家精神创造社会影响的动态参与者。我们的跨学科审查突出了现有文献中的趋势和差距，并为研究人员提供了基于证据的研究议程，以指导未来对该重要主题的调查。