Sustainable Entrepreneurship Under Market Uncertainty: Opportunities, Challenges, and Impact

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are often viewed as uniquely positioned to address neglected social problems, and sustainable entrepreneurship in particular has been presented as the ‘green panacea’ that will put us on a path to mitigate climate change and other sustainability challenges. However, sustainable markets are fraught with uncertainties that curb entrepreneurial ventures’ potential to deliver on such ambitious expectations. Despite several attempts to take stock of the literature on sustainable entrepreneurship, we lack a rigorous framework for systematically incorporating the market uncertainty that entrepreneurs face across different types of markets. In this paper we draw upon recent literature on collective action during market emergence and growth to develop an organizing framework to map entrepreneurial efforts across markets with varying degrees of uncertainty. In applying this framework to sustainable entrepreneurship, we highlight how demand and supply uncertainty affect sustainable entrepreneurship opportunities and challenges, and discuss to what extent entrepreneurial efforts may drive or inhibit societal impacts.

Keywords: sustainable entrepreneurship, market uncertainty, collective action, climate change, sustainability, entrepreneurship