Ideation Stage STEM Entrepreneur’s Cognitive Frame on Sustainability: A Leadership Development

Abstract

There are consistent appeals for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) entrepreneurial efforts, to sync with real-world problems and sustainability. Even though most entrepreneur acknowledge their efforts for tackling sustainability concerns, it is uncertain how serious they are or whether they truly comprehend the basic sustainability understanding. So, it’s important to have a critical understanding of underlying cognitive components that drive the sustainability leadership paradigm, as young entrepreneurs find it difficult to interpret and make sense of it. By using a cognitive approach to sustainability leadership development, the current investigation looks at how nascent entrepreneurs think about sustainability leadership and how they make sense of them to be sustainability leader. Qualitative data from 113 ideation stage startups showed that sustainability leadership identity is associated with implicit leadership theory and leadership-structure schema. Sustainability Leaders were categorized as sustainability agnostic leaders, sustainability compliance leaders, situational sustainability leaders and sustainability evangelists. Managerial and policy for nurturing sustainability leadership development are discussed.