Researching Sustainopreneurship - conditions, concepts, approaches, arenas and questions An invitation to authentic sustainability business forces

Abstract

This paper suggests a research agenda outlined for further inquiry of the concept sustainopreneurship, and includes a call for and an invitation to authentic forces to take the concept further in idea, applied interaction and reflective practice. The concept was first introduced in 2000; the phenomenon developed with publications in 2003, and further evolved and tentatively was defined in 2006. The context of sustainability sets conditions of complexity, call for urgency and ingenuity, and need for tangible, realworld results achieved through creative organizing with a holistic mindset from forces prepared to rise to this challenge. The business world has been nominated as a premier force to create a sustainable world, especially when acting as a source of innovation and creativity, and it is claimed that sustainopreneurship could be the accentuating factor to give even more leverage to forces emerging from the world of business activities to contribute to sustainability. Collectively, these issues motivate a need for further research on sustainopreneurship. Conceptually, this paper suggests a deeper analysis to be conducted with a nuanced and detailed taxonomy and framework created of sustainability innovations, the core of sustainopreneurship, primarily by cataloguing and categorizing case stories. It is also needed to make a more detailed description to position sustainopreneurship towards other concepts in the wider, general idea-sphere of the “business case of sustainability”, in the contemporary plethora of “buzz-words”, approaches, methods and acronyms that already exists – and in this context also to motivate why this concept adds value. It is recommended, though, to keep research applied, to identify obstacles and institutional barriers, and how to overcome them; i. e. facilitating factors for sustainopreneurship, researching prospective tools, enablers and approaches. Appropriate areas and domains for sustainopreneurship applied should also be digested. Recommended research methods are “enactive research” and “open space technology”, since they add instant value among stakeholders, and in themselves naturally builds arenas where sustainopreneurship evolves and proliferates. For progress, beyond these “how”-related pointers, the key is to single out “the big questions”, getting answers through collaborative, collective dialogue and conversation, with an explicit interaction and results orientation. Issues and topics are formulated, where it is of striking importance with an intention to attract authentic forces potentially hearing the call of this invitation. 1 This paper has been possible through funding from Forum for Smaforetagsforskning: Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research, http.//www.fsf.se, to which the author gives his thanks.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.