Ecopreneurship

Business practices for a sustainable future

Niels Robert Schneider

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110684698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmertum

This research monograph answers the question how sustainability driven entrepreneurs (ecopreneurs) deliver their sustainability goals through their business practices. The research draws on data from 12 case studies set within the food industry. The analysis takes a firm level and a supply chain level perspective and provides insights to the interconnected nature of sustainability goals within and across firms.

It provides theoretical propositions that show one approach of how to conduct business in a way that works for the planet and people in addition to shareholders. This presents an alternative understanding of organisational performance that builds the foundation for many avenues of future research into sustainable management.

The research combines the remote areas of supply chain management and entrepreneurship at the intersection of sustainability. This novel approach and the insights from the business practice exploration, offer many avenues for further research beyond entrepreneurship and supply chain management. This book will be of interest to academics in management research and also to people with an academic background that work together with sustainability driven and/ or social entrepreneurs, who could benefit from the insights into how sustainability goals are delivered through business practices and the relevant trade-offs faced by ecopreneurs.

1 Introduction

During the last two decades, mounting evidence of human influences on climate change has propelled the issue into the global spotlight, making it an important concern for politicians, NGOs, businesses and the general population. Growing pressure from politicians and consumers has put sustainability, as a means to mitigate climate change, on the agenda of businesses and management researchers (Danloup et al., 2015; Filippi, 2014; Marshall et al., 2015a), leading to the rise of environmental management systems in large and established corporations (Ulhøi & Welford, 2000). Despite these efforts and the implementation of climate change policies, the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase at an accelerated rate during the last decade (IPCC, 2018). Yet in an examination of large corporations’ sustainability reports in 2014, Ihlen & Roper (2014) found that many large corporations claim to have successfully implemented sustainable practices and no longer see themselves on a journey towards sustainability. This attitude may have changed through the recently increased awareness of climate change sparked by Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough. It does, however, show a certain complacency to tackle climate change in large corporations. In their latest report, the IPCC (2018) again postulated that to avoid irreversible climate changes from global warming, mitigation efforts beyond those practiced today are required, yet socio-economic inertia seems to limit the mitigation efforts undertaken by businesses and society. What is needed is a shift in socio-economic values and beliefs to foster innovative sustainable business practices (Phillips, 2015).

One source of socio-economic change that challenges established corporations is assumed to be found in entrepreneurship (Drucker, 2007; Kirby, 2003). With regard to this assumption, sustainability driven entrepreneurship (henceforth: ecopreneurship) is expected to play a role in driving sustainable development (Pastakia, 1998). Sustainable development is a much-discussed issue, with one of the most accepted definitions following the 17 sustainable development goals set out by the United Nations General Assembly (2015). The specific contributions of ecopreneurship to sustainable development differ across industries. However generally conducting business in a sustainable way is considered as meeting the triple bottom line (Elkington, 1999) of economic, social and ecologic sustainability. Meeting these dimensions could be achieved through creating economic growth, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving working conditions simultaneously. The specific sustainability issues addressed by ecopreneurs in this book will be outlined in the literature review.

1.1 Research background

To date, the literature on ecopreneurship holds theoretical ideas about ecopreneurial opportunities in the sustainability context (Cohen & Winn, 2007; Dean & McMullen, 2007; Kearins, Collins & Tregidga, 2010) and empirical evidence on the ecopreneurs’ reasoning behind their motivation to start up and grow their ventures (Dixon & Clifford, 2007; Kirkwood & Walton, 2010a; Kirkwood & Walton, 2010b; Phillips, 2012). The literature also provides insights into organisation design (Parrish, 2010; Tarnanidis, Papathanasiou & Subeniotis, 2019), green product features (Kirkwood & Walton, 2014) and the venture development process (Choi & Gray, 2008; Muños & Cohen, 2018). The hybrid ventures literature lends itself to inform the discussion on ecopreneurship with regards to business models and the challenges faced by firms pursuing multiple conflicting goals (Barrientos & Reilly, 2016; Battilana et al., 2015; Davies & Chambers, 2018; Doherty, Haugh & Lyon, 2014; Dohrmann, Raith & Siebold, 2015; Santos, Pache & Birkholz, 2015; Smith et al., 2012; York, O’Neil & Sarasvathy, 2016). In general, the area is still in its infancy and evidence on how ecopreneurs deliver their contribution to sustainable development through their business practices is lacking. Exploring these business practices is the main objective of this book.

However, when considering an organisation’s sustainability, it is important to assess the sustainability of its entire supply chain (Ahi & Searcy, 2015). While the literature on sustainable supply chain management is rapidly developing, to date the role of ecopreneurs in their supply chain has mostly been overlooked. Among the sparse relevant work, Kirkwood & Walton (2010b) examined how ecopreneurs’ values effect their supply chain decision-making. However, this study focussed on the decision-making within the firm and not on a supply chain level. Another paper examined how sustainable innovation originating from ecopreneurship is disseminated and its impact on incumbent supply chains (Hansen & Schaltegger, 2013). As far as my understanding goes, there is hardly any other research on ecopreneurial business practices in a supply chain context. As will be shown in the literature review, there is reason to assume that ecopreneurs’ engagement in supply chain management will differ from that of incumbent firms, making researching it worthwhile.

The food industry was chosen as the empirical context for this research. This industry is responsible for one third of anthropogenic greenhouse gases (Conto et al., 2014) and 70% of the world’s fresh water use, as well as the provision of livelihood for 40% of the world’s population (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 2015). Consequently, the food industry has a major impact on the economic, social and environmental wellbeing of the world. The literature review will show that ecopreneurial activity within the food sector is expected to be high, since their aim of re-localising and re-socialising food production addresses a multitude of sustainability issues emerging from the food industry (Roep & Wiskerke, 2012; Sonnino & Marsden, 2006; Watts, Ilbery & Maye, 2005).

1.2 Research objective and questions

This book draws on the literature on ecopreneurship, supply chain management and the food industry (as shown in figure 1.1), specifically alternative food networks to explore the business practices through which ecopreneurs drive sustainable development from a firm level and a supply chain level perspective.

Fig. 1.1: Bodies of literature.

To address the empirical gap in the literature, this research aims at answering the following overarching questions through an explorative case study approach:

RQ1:

How do ecopreneurs deliver their sustainability goals through their business practices?

RQ2:

How do ecopreneurs’ supply chain practices impact the fulfilment of their sustainability goals?

The research questions address the research objective from the mentioned firm level and supply chain level and signal the main questions of the two findings chapters. The questions were further divided into sub-questions which are outlined in appendix A.

Due to the exploratory nature of the questions, a qualitative approach was adopted in this research. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and documents on 12 organisations. To make sense of the data, inductive coding and a theoretically focussed thematic analysis were applied. The emergent findings were then analysed using two case study approaches. First, using a cross-case examination with the organisations as individual cases, the ecopreneurial business practices on the firm level were explored. Second, the organisations were nested in one case representing a complete supply network to examine the interactions between the organisations and explore the ecopreneurial business practices on the supply chain level. The resulting insights provide an in-depth understanding of the ecopreneurial practices that foster sustainable development in the food industry.

1.3 Research contribution

This book contributes to the entrepreneurship literature and the sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) literature, especially with regard to ecopreneurial practices, the hybrid ventures literature and the literature on alternative food networks (AFNs). The research contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by providing empirical evidence for the business practices through which ecopreneurs address markets failures (Dean & McMullen, 2007) and drive sustainable innovation (Cohen & Winn, 2007). It further presents evidence for the claim that ecopreneurs are not profit motivated (Kirkwood & Walton, 2010a; Parrish, 2010; Phillips, 2012) and uncovers the interconnected nature of their business practices with regard to the different dimensions of sustainability. This provides insights into the trade-offs ecopreneurs encounter when combining multiple sustainability goals in their business models. This research further creates insights into the practices that ecopreneurs apply to transform economic value captured in their operations, into social and ecologic value to fulfil their mission. Lastly, this research contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by showing that ecopreneurs address all three sustainability dimensions (economic, ecologic and social) simultaneously and thus complement the dichotomies of social and commercial (Williams & Nadin, 2013) and green and commercial entrepreneurs (Kirkwood & Walton, 2014) that are currently dominant in the literature.

This book contributes to the field of SSCM by exploring how sustainability is pursued in the absence of a focal firm. This constitutes a new approach in comparison to the existent SSCM research which focusses on sustainability measures implemented by larger corporations with a power advantage (Dubey, Gunasekaran & Ali, 2015; Frostenson & Prenkert, 2015; Hall, Matos & Silvestre, 2012; Lee, 2016; Seuring & Müller, 2008). By investigating the supply network of ecopreneurs, this research provides novel insights into SSCM in complex networks made up of firms without a dominant player. These findings hold empirical evidence for the collaborative approaches used in the absence of power advantages, which are seen as promising routes towards sustainable development in supply chains (Lee, 2016; Leigh & Xiaohong, 2015; Zhang & Awasthi, 2014). It shows that ecopreneurs build their supply networks on trust and integrate the wider community into the decision-making process (Cholette et al., 2014; Danloup et al., 2015; Parrish, 2010). This research further provides evidence for supply chain practices through which ecopreneurs deliver their sustainability driven values (Kirkwood & Walton, 2010b). Because ecopreneurs do not subscribe to a profit maximising logic, they apply a mix of value-led and pragmatic selection criteria in their sourcing and distribution decisions. This also gives some indication about the flow of sustainability in supply networks, where economic sustainability appears to flow upstream, while social and ecologic sustainability flows downstream through the supply chain.

Through the combined insights from the firm level and supply chain level analysis, this research uncovers the ecopreneurial business logic that considers profit as neutral to organisational success unless it is translated into activities that contribute to sustainable development. This contribution touches on the wider field of management, as it holds the potential to evaluate business practices in a sustainability context through an alternative understanding of organisational performance.

To the hybrid venture literature, this research contributes by placing ecopreneurs, as organisations pursuing econom...