This article discusses the emerging research concerned with sustainable development and entrepreneurship, which is the focus of this special issue of the Journal of Business Venturing. Entrepreneurship has been recognized as a major conduit for sustainable products and processes, and new ventures are being held up as a panacea for many social and environmental concerns. However, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of entrepreneurship's role and how it may unfold. We begin with an overview of sustainable development and the role of entrepreneurship and outline recent contributions exploring this role. We then summarize the papers presented in this special issue and conclude with suggestions for further research.
Sustainable development has emerged as an influential, yet controversial, concept for business and policy. Awareness is growing that a fundamental transformation in the way society consumes natural resources and produces energy may be needed if we are to make progress on pressing environmental issues such as ecosystem degradation and global climate change. With this as context, entrepreneurship is increasingly being cited as a significant conduit for bringing about a transformation to sustainable products and processes. Numerous books that sound dire warnings of environmental disaster often end on an optimistic note, concluding that civilization's salvation rests upon the shoulders of heroic social and environmental entrepreneurs (Brown, 2006, Homer-Dixon, 2006, Lovins et al., 2004 and Vaitheeswaran, 2003). Influential practitioner journals such as the Harvard Business Review and the MIT Sloan Management Review advance the idea that entrepreneurship may be a panacea for many social and environmental concerns ( Brugmann and Prahalad, 2007, Handy, 2003, Senge et al., 2007, Hart and Milstein, 1999 and Wheeler et al., 2005).
Yet, despite the promise entrepreneurship holds for fostering sustainable development, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of entrepreneurship's role in the area of sustainability and how it may unfold. While entrepreneurship has long been recognized as a vehicle for societal transformation, especially as an economy moves from one technological epoch to another (Schumpeter, 1934 and Schumpeter, 1942), we have little understanding of how entrepreneurs will discover and develop those opportunities that lie beyond the pull of existing markets. While the case for entrepreneurship having a central role in a transition to a more sustainable society has been proposed by many, there remain major gaps in our knowledge of whether and how this process will actually unfold.
To date, the academic discourse on sustainable development within the entrepreneurship literature has been sparse. Relatively few rigorous studies exploring the relationship between sustainable development and entrepreneurship have been published in mainstream entrepreneurship journals. The purpose of this special issue is to begin to address this gap. In this paper, we outline some of the recent contributions exploring the role of entrepreneurship in sustainable development. We also identify the gaps in our understanding of this emerging research, provide an overview of the papers in this special issue that bridge some of these gaps, and conclude with suggestions for further research in this increasingly important area.
While sustainable development remains ambiguously defined and controversial, it has emerged as an influential concept for entrepreneurship policy, practice, and theory. However, while entrepreneurship has been cited as a significant conduit for a more sustainable society, there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the nature of this role and how it will unfold. We outlined recent research in the area, acknowledging that the majority of studies exploring the relationship between sustainable development and entrepreneurship have been published outside of the mainstream entrepreneurship journals, and suggest that this special issue is a first step in filling this void. However, while papers in this special issue provide a major step in this direction, there remain considerable opportunities for further research. Although we provided suggestions for further research in this increasingly important area, the key issue, as a research agenda and in practice, remains: will entrepreneurs rise to the challenge?
