Opportunity development process in sustainability entrepreneurship

Abstract

The concept of sustainability has become of major relevance in management literature and business education. It has crossed the boundaries of corporate social responsibility towards new perspectives that stress the necessity of a more holistic approach to entrepreneurial value creation. Although the field of sustainability entrepreneurship has advanced in proving a definition and description of its phenomenon, current literature has so far been unable to capture and explain, both conceptually and empirically, how and why particular individuals decide to pursue opportunities with social and environmental components concurrent with pursuing economic viability. This study tackles this challenge by examining the complex set of conditions that produce the different components of this particular opportunity development process, comprising the development of venture ideas, the organization of entrepreneurial actions and the formation of exchange relationships. Based on an inductive Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of the opportunity process of 45 sustainable ventures, this study explores 13 different potential conditions for the above outcomes, upon which it identifies necessary conditions and sufficient configurations of conditions that lead to the integration of sustainability in the different stages of the opportunity process. The study provides refined knowledge and theoretical language on complex causation that facilitate the explanation of how this process unfolds based on the logic of necessity and sufficiency. It makes a broader contribution to both theorizing and research design in the study of entrepreneurial processes and outcomes by presenting a systematic and configurational view of entrepreneurial efforts and offering a basis for understanding the integration of sustainability in the development of venture opportunities.