Beyond Financial Performance and Corporate Greening: Mapping out the Research Field of Sustainability Entrepreneurship

Sustainability entrepreneurs are seen as key actors in facing contemporary structural problems and creating sustainable growth and wealth. They bring into being a new approach to business opportunities that resolves the dualistic divide between business ventures and altruistic endeavours, in favour of a new logic based on the creation of economic value beyond corporate boundaries while improving the social and ecological environments. Despite the recent surge of research interest on this topic, there remains a lack of understanding of the nature of this phenomenon. Therefore, there is a need to define boundaries, connect theoretical fields and provide deeper explanations of sustainability entrepreneurship beyond current approaches to corporate sustainability and social entrepreneurship.

This paper seeks to address some of these issues by focusing on the distinctive importance of sustainability entrepreneurship within entrepreneurship research and developing a conceptual framework aimed at mapping out the field while at the same time adhering to empirical relevance. In doing so, we define sustainability entrepreneurship as the scholarly examination of how and by whom opportunities to create future goods and services are recognised, evaluated, and exploited, while improving the development of society, the economy and the environment, allowing future generations to meet their own needs. Based on this definition, we draw upon literature on entrepreneurship theory and sustainable development and propose three avenues for further research on this topic: theoretical and empirical definition of sustainability entrepreneurs, the process of development of sustainability-oriented venture opportunities and the interaction between institutions and sustainability entrepreneurship. Within each avenue we pose relevant research questions that are of both descriptive and explanatory nature, and aim to bring closer the conceptual and empirical aspects of sustainability entrepreneurship. Focusing on these dimensions and questions helps visualise and analyse currently disparate conditions, features, and outcomes of sustainability entrepreneurship, thus increasing the intensity and quality of future theoretical and empirical work.