Abstract
Employee-owned businesses, benefit corporations, and other efforts in sustainability entrepreneurship are responding to prevalent challenges such as climate change, economic inequalities, and unethical business behavior. Universities, however, often fall short in sufficiently equipping students with competencies in sustainability entrepreneurship. One reason is that none of the existing frameworks links competencies to the actual processes of entrepreneurship, from discovery to consolidation. If graduates are to successfully start and run sustainability-oriented enterprises, the real-world entrepreneurship processes should provide the main orientation for training and learning. The present study proposes such a framework. We first conducted a qualitative literature review on competencies for entrepreneurs, sustainability professionals, social entrepreneurs, and sustainability entrepreneurs. We clustered the identified competencies according to conceptual similarities. On this basis, we describe sustainability entrepreneurship competencies along the entrepreneurial process model. The result is a process-oriented and literature-based framework of sustainability entrepreneurship competencies. It is intended to be used as a general vision for students, faculty, and entrepreneurs, as well as for the design of curricula, courses, and assessments.
Highlights
Employee-owned businesses, benefit corporations, and local living economies counter business-as-usual practices by sourcing ingredients and materials locally, producing goods in zero-waste facilities powered by renewable energy, and by offering robust employee benefits and well-being programs, among others
We propose a framework of sustainability entrepreneurship competencies along an entrepreneurial process model, describing each process phase with associated tasks and competencies
For the practice-orientation, we developed a simple entrepreneurial process model using insights from entrepreneurship literature [16,17,18,19,20,21,22] and from our literature review
Summary
Employee-owned businesses, benefit corporations, and local living economies counter business-as-usual practices by sourcing ingredients and materials locally, producing goods in zero-waste facilities powered by renewable energy, and by offering robust employee benefits and well-being programs, among others. These practices are examples of comprehensive or transformational sustainability entrepreneurship, driven by the vision of empowering the workforce and community, as well as developing products and services that minimize the impacts on the social and ecological systems we depend on, but improve them [1,2]. The Grenada Chocolate Company empowers organic community farms and pioneers zero-emission distribution systems using solar power and sailboats to export their products
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