The way entrepreneurs learn remains largely uncharted territory. Literature on entrepreneurial learning has focused on organisational learning dynamics that have been little studied in entrepreneurship and rarely through empirical qualitative studies. In this article, we explore dynamics of collective learning in an entrepreneurial context, based on an exploratory study of a French coworking space reserved to social entrepreneurs. We describe and characterize three learning situations and the nature of learning at work in these situations: transmission of pre-existing knowledge through doing in a group, creation of new knowledge by combination of knowledge dispersed among members, and emergence of shared knowledge about the ‘domain’ that brought them together through compilation and synthesis of information held by the different participants. On this basis, we explain how groups are formed in which these collective learning dynamics can develop. We thus propose to speak of an 'entrepreneurial community of practice' to underline the specific conditions under which collective learning processes similar to those highlighted by the literature on communities of practice may emerge in an entrepreneurial context: a physical space, a coordinating team, comparability and complementarity between the hosted members engaged in different ventures.
