Dear Colleagues,

Despite the promise entrepreneurship offers to help solve sustainable, environmental, and social challenges, its role remains uncertain. While many see businesses as responsible for core environmental and social problems today, others praise the role that innovation and entrepreneurship have as a driving force for change and hence the key to a more sustainable future. The polyvalent nature of entrepreneurship fosters the development of two ideologies; one calling for tight regulatory frameworks to mitigate unproductive entrepreneurial activities and another overestimating the role of businesses in solving sustainability issues. Both perceptions have in common that as a society, we might miss out on entrepreneurship’s potential to reduce environmental and societal problems and so adversely impact the quality of life.

We argue that entrepreneurship’s value for sustainability remains ambiguous as long as we do not fully understand when and how entrepreneurship is able to unfold its full productive potential to address sustainability challenges. Or, what are the conditions to keep unwanted, negative impacts and unproductive entrepreneurship under control?

This Special Issue aims to close this gap in our knowledge. We invite qualitative, quantitative, and conceptual papers to contribute to a better understanding of what enables the full potential of entrepreneurship to innovate products, services, and processes with a lasting positive impact on sustainability. Adopting a broad understanding of sustainability that includes both environmental and social issues, we are open to papers from various disciplines. We encourage researchers to unearth macro- and micro-level mechanisms both internally (e.g., the entrepreneurial team, processes, values, mindsets, organization, innovation, or start-up strategies) and externally (e.g., legal framework, networks, ecosystems, stakeholders or shareholders) through which entrepreneurship can fulfil its promise for sustainability. We further welcome papers which critique or question the potential of entrepreneurship or investigate its boundary conditions for making a positive impact on sustainability. 

To address this area of research, the propose a Special Issue calls for papers that present work on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• How can different disciplinary perspectives on entrepreneurship be combined to enrich our understanding of the sustainability-entrepreneurship relationship across the entrepreneurial process?
• For what sustainability outcomes should we expect entrepreneurial ventures’ differences and why?
• What are the mechanisms and boundary conditions through which entrepreneurship shapes sustainability outcomes?
• Do sustainability-entrepreneurship dynamics develop differently for different types of entrepreneurial initiatives (from necessity to social entrepreneurship, and opportunity-driven entrepreneurship)? And if so why and how?
• Do sustainability-entrepreneurship dynamics develop differently for different types of actors involved in the entrepreneurship process? And if so for which actors, why and how?
• How does the institutional and cultural context influence the sustainability-entrepreneurship dynamics?

Prof. Dr. Christian Linder
Prof. Dr. Paul Gardiner
Prof. Dr. Christian Lechner
Dr. Marianna Marino
Dr. Elisa Villani
Guest Editors

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