Impacts of promoting sustainable entrepreneurship in generic business plan competitions

Abstract

Entrepreneurs and start-ups are key actors in implementing environmental innovation and new approaches in cleaner production. Therefore, the integration of sustainability considerations in early phases of a new venture is important. Insights on how this can be effectively implemented in start-up support systems are scarce and represent a research gap. Business plan competitions (BPCs) constitute an important element in entrepreneurial support systems, and are a powerful force in driving entrepreneurial activity. Up till now, it is unclear whether BPCs can actually influence the sustainability orientation of participating entrepreneurs and the sustainability performance of their ventures. The purpose of this work is to clarify whether the integration of sustainability goals and considerations into generic BPCs has an impact on the business activities of participating entrepreneurs and start-up teams. For our investigation we conducted a survey of the more than 1000 participants in the Business Plan Wettbewerb Berlin Brandenburg, which is the oldest and biggest generic business plan competition in Germany. For the analysis we use a structural equation model and apply the partial-least-squares method. Findings reveal that the promotion of sustainability in generic BPCs have an impact on the integration of sustainability in start-up business activity. Thus, from a sustainability point of view it makes sense to explicitly integrate sustainability into the concrete support offerings of generic BPCs. Our research contributes to cleaner production research by providing new insights on context factors in early (seed and start-up) phases of a new venture.