Sustainability startups and where to find them: Investigating the share of sustainability startups across entrepreneurial ecosystems and the causal drivers of differences

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Sustainability startups and where to find them: Investigating the share of sustainability startups across entrepreneurial ecosystems and the causal drivers of differences
 
Tiba, Sarah; van Rijnsoever, Frank J.; Hekkert, Marko P.
(2021) Journal of Cleaner Production, volume 306, pp. 1 - 15
(Article)
Abstract
While it is well known where the best entrepreneurial ecosystems can be found in general, such information is missing in the case of sustainability entrepreneurial ecosystems. These are entrepreneurial ecosystems with high shares of startups that are active in industries which address the Sustainable Development Goals through innovation. Not knowing ... read more
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Keywords: Entrepreneurial ecosystems, Startup, Sustainable development, Sustainable entrepreneurship, Topic model, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, General Environmental Science, Strategy and Management, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.127054
ISSN: 0959-6526
Publisher: Elsevier
Note: Funding Information: The second most prominent topic is ?Quality Education? (20.5%), covering various enterprises fostering learning at all ages. It is thus noteworthy that the vast majority of sustainability startups in our sample do not focus on environmental issues addressed by the SDGs. The three environmental SDGs represented in our dataset, ?Clean Energy? (6.8%), ?Life on Land? (2.6%) and ?Responsible Consumption? (2.2%), are addressed in sum by only 11.6% of the sustainability startups we identified. This finding confirms the results of previous studies which have found that companies engaged in responsibility-oriented activities place less emphasis on environmental than on social issues (Shnayder et al., 2015). One explanation offered for this is that environmental initiatives are often more difficult and more costly to implement than social ones. Furthermore, there is likely to be greater demand for products and services that improve customers' well-being by supporting, for example, their health or education than for green products, which may be more expensive than the products customers currently use or be less likely to facilitate a scalable business model (van der Linden, 2018). We assess ecosystem characteristics that may be conducive to an EE having a higher share of sustainability startups in the Factors for Sustainability section. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s)
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