Policy for Sustainable Entrepreneurship: A Crowdsourced Framework

Abstract

Sustainable entrepreneurship-entrepreneurship with social and ecological gains as well as economic ones-has the potential to play a significant role in addressing societal and environmental challenges. However, sustainability and entrepreneurship have hitherto been addressed through separate policy regimes, and it is not clear how policymakers can encourage sustainable entrepreneurship specifically. The authors develop a policy framework for sustainable entrepreneurship, using an open innovation approach with policymakers, business executives, academics, entrepreneurs and other relevant actors, including an online crowdsourcing event with 150 participants. The framework incorporates five policy domains: creating awareness and skills; building networks; funding and investing; measuring impact and performance; and innovating government. The article proposes a modified version of the multilevel perspective (MLP) on how socio-technical transitions occur, since the findings suggest that policy can catalyse the facilitation and aggregation of innovations coming from the niche level, thereby evolving the socio-technical regime, in addition to the role of policy described in earlier work in stabilising the socio-technical regime. Contributions to entrepreneurship policy literature include the policy domain of measuring impact and performance, as appropriate success measures are non-trivial in a triple bottom line environment, and the potential for open policy innovation in entrepreneurship policy. Contributions to sustainability policy literature include the requirements for support mechanisms and capacity building to empower individuals to contribute as innovators and entrepreneurs and not just consumers. The sustainable entrepreneurship framework can be applied by policymakers to develop context-specific policies: this is illustrated with a worked example of EU policy recommendations. The paper also outlines a method for crowdsourcing policy innovations.

Policymakers’ views on sustainable end-user innovation: Implications for sustainable innovation

“…Instead, innovation policy has primarily targeted larger corporations and/or small and medium-sized enterprises (Henkel and von Hippel, 2005), while sustainability policy remains focused on efficiency improvements (Creutzig et al, 2018) and on changing the behavior of established incumbents (Baldwin and von Hippel, 2011). The emerging role of end-users in innovation has thus not yet effectively reached policymakers (Watson et al, 2019). This is especially problematic in view of the fact that a wide range of studies suggest user innovation is a widespread activity that arguably deserves policy attention (Franke et al, 2016).…”