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In this paper, the role of communities of practice as a form of community entrepreneurship is examined. The community of practice is situated within a university incubator. This is an apposite context to study this context-sensitive factor as the incubation environment is a space specifically configured to bring advisors and mentors together with early-stage entrepreneurs. In this paper, entrepreneurship has been framed as a process focussing upon the actions and interactions that occur in a community of practice. Thus, a single case study approach (Yin, 2009) was deemed appropriate to provide a rich account of the activities and interactions characteristic of entrepreneurial behaviour. The case study analysis is based on the business venture, Echo, a peer-to-peer recycling application to reduce household waste. In developing the paper, three main contributions have been made. First, the concept of communities of practice has been extended to the field of entrepreneurship, which does not analytically interrogate the role of communities or focus on the emergent area of community entrepreneurship. Community development is useful to both nascent and experienced entrepreneurs. Second, the importance of interactions within the community of practice in helping legitimate new ventures is identified and explained. The third contribution highlights the novel and important role of context and then focuses on how the environment can be made more favourable for entrepreneurship.