Sustainable entrepreneurship: How do contextual factors play a role?

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has been looked upon to address and solve important environmental and societal issues. Sustainable entrepreneurship has emerged as sub-field of entrepreneurship that seeks to combine the pursuit of social, ecological and economic value. While sustainable entrepreneurship is deemed to play a crucial role in sustainable development, we have a limited understanding of factors that are perceived to hinder or facilitate the early development of sustainable start-ups. This study focuses on uncovering difficulties and facilitating factors as perceived by different actors - the start-up's team, shareholders, venture capitalists and other stakeholders- involved in the early stage of development of a sustainable start-up in a region of Switzerland. Insights from this study contribute to the emerging research on sustainable entrepreneurship, and to the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) stream of research on entrepreneurship that has so far dealt with new venturing processes and with sustainability in business network, without focusing yet on the development of sustainable start-ups. The findings have important implications for sustainable entrepreneurs, and policymakers and open up new lines of research.