Abstract
While the number of green start-ups has steadily increased around the world in response to the environmental problems demanding immediate solutions, there are several unresolved questions on the behaviour and performance of such ventures. The papers in this special issue shed light on these issues by underscoring the role of several factors, such as industry life cycles, knowledge spillovers, institutions, and availability of external finance, in shaping decision-making and firm behaviour in green start-ups. This paper highlights the state-of-the-art developments in the literature, discusses the key contributions of the papers put together in this special issue, and presents a future research agenda for scholars interested in green entrepreneurship.
Highlights
While the number of green start-ups has steadily increased around the world in response to the environmental problems demanding immediate solutions, there are several unresolved questions on the behaviour and performance of such ventures
The low carbon environmental goods and services (LCEGS) sector has continued to expanded at nearly 4% per annum while the global turnover in the sector exceeded $5.4 trillion in 2012 (BIS 2013)
Investments into environmentally sustainable technologies1 are essential to addressing environmental issues and facilitating the transition into a low carbon economy (Dean and McMullen 2007; Esty and Winston, 2009)
Summary
The low carbon environmental goods and services (LCEGS) sector has continued to expanded at nearly 4% per annum while the global turnover in the sector exceeded $5.4 trillion in 2012 (BIS 2013). The conventional wisdom of green ventures, as derived from the study of large companies, tends to emphasise the benefits of going green in terms of cost-efficiency, innovation offsets, attendant revenue growth through product differentiation, increased transparency, reduced organisational inertia, better risk management and improved relationships with external stakeholders, and the like (Ambec and Lanoie 2008; Porter and van der Linde 1995) Such logics often fail to apply or apply with significant qualification to their small entrepreneurial counterparts. More data-based evidence is necessary to better understand the behaviour and performance of green entrepreneurs This special issue attempts to integrate the economics and entrepreneurship literatures on new green ventures to advance the scholarship on the role of born green firms. The last section presents the conclusions along with a discussion on potential future lines of scholarly inquiry on green entrepreneurship
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