Abstract
While it is well known where the best entrepreneurial ecosystems can be found in general, such information is missing in the case of sustainability entrepreneurial ecosystems. These are entrepreneurial ecosystems with high shares of startups that are active in industries which address the Sustainable Development Goals through innovation. Not knowing what the best sustainability entrepreneurial ecosystems are, inhibits sustainability startups to locate to regions with the most favourable supportive conditions. This paper addresses the above-mentioned gap by establishing a ranking of entrepreneurial ecosystems according to their share of sustainability enterprises. For this purpose, we have analysed the websites of 19,997 startups in the 28 largest entrepreneurial ecosystems according to the Startup Genome project using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We find that the highest proportion of sustainability startups among these entrepreneurial ecosystems is located in Boston, followed by Houston, Seattle and Lagos, respectively. A qualitative comparative analysis of the causal patterns underlying our results reveals that high GDP in combination with either (1) high shares of female founders of startups or (2) high shares of non-religious people in the population induce entrepreneurial ecosystems with relatively high levels of sustainability enterprises. Our work aims to stimulate further scholarly interest in sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial ecosystems. Policy makers can use the causal drivers to increase the share of sustainability startups in their region.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 127054 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-15 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | Journal of Cleaner Production |
| Volume | 306 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 15 Jul 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The second most prominent topic is ?Quality Education? (20.5%), covering various enterprises fostering learning at all ages. It is thus noteworthy that the vast majority of sustainability startups in our sample do not focus on environmental issues addressed by the SDGs. The three environmental SDGs represented in our dataset, ?Clean Energy? (6.8%), ?Life on Land? (2.6%) and ?Responsible Consumption? (2.2%), are addressed in sum by only 11.6% of the sustainability startups we identified. This finding confirms the results of previous studies which have found that companies engaged in responsibility-oriented activities place less emphasis on environmental than on social issues (Shnayder et al., 2015). One explanation offered for this is that environmental initiatives are often more difficult and more costly to implement than social ones. Furthermore, there is likely to be greater demand for products and services that improve customers' well-being by supporting, for example, their health or education than for green products, which may be more expensive than the products customers currently use or be less likely to facilitate a scalable business model (van der Linden, 2018). We assess ecosystem characteristics that may be conducive to an EE having a higher share of sustainability startups in the Factors for Sustainability section.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s)
Funding
The second most prominent topic is ?Quality Education? (20.5%), covering various enterprises fostering learning at all ages. It is thus noteworthy that the vast majority of sustainability startups in our sample do not focus on environmental issues addressed by the SDGs. The three environmental SDGs represented in our dataset, ?Clean Energy? (6.8%), ?Life on Land? (2.6%) and ?Responsible Consumption? (2.2%), are addressed in sum by only 11.6% of the sustainability startups we identified. This finding confirms the results of previous studies which have found that companies engaged in responsibility-oriented activities place less emphasis on environmental than on social issues (Shnayder et al., 2015). One explanation offered for this is that environmental initiatives are often more difficult and more costly to implement than social ones. Furthermore, there is likely to be greater demand for products and services that improve customers' well-being by supporting, for example, their health or education than for green products, which may be more expensive than the products customers currently use or be less likely to facilitate a scalable business model (van der Linden, 2018). We assess ecosystem characteristics that may be conducive to an EE having a higher share of sustainability startups in the Factors for Sustainability section.
Keywords
- Entrepreneurial ecosystems
- Startup
- Sustainable development
- Sustainable entrepreneurship
- Topic model
