The Challenges
Poverty. Climate Change. HIV/AIDS. The contemporary world problems are lined up. We have a world where approximately 4 billion people live on less than $4 a day. A temperature increase in the atmosphere has led to severe climate effects with weather catastrophes, droughts, floods and polar ice meltdowns. The HIV/AIDS epidemic is on its way to make the major part of a whole continent implode, with vicious circles that makes Africa lose parents, teachers, doctors, farmers and bread-winners for families, leaving kids alone in the streets.
The Response
The means to meet these challenges are troubled with business-as-usual thinking. What we need is a more entrepreneurial approach, to think – and act! – outside the box. Or act as if there were no box at all! But not just any kind of entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurship and innovation for sustainability – ’sustainopreneurship’. In short – Business with a Cause.
Creative Business Organizing for Sustainability
Practically, it means to use business organizing and venturing as a means to solve sustainability-related problems, and while doing so – in the process do things so it does not jeopardize the present and the coming generations ability to fulfil its needs. Usually, when talking about sustainability in the business context, this has been in the focus – to adjust, to adapt, to put constraints to business, and business seen more as of a problem than of a solution. Sustainopreneurship flips this reasoning upside down, as well as from where the solution comes: It views the sustainability agenda as something that creates even greater business opportunities than the problems – making powerful businesses out of mind-blowing creativity of sustainability innovations. And the solution and business emerges from the local context, bottom-up, not top-down. Acting local, thinking global!
Three main dimensions
What differs ’sustanopreneurship’ from ‘entrepreneurship-as-usual’?. Mainly three dimensions. The purpose of the venturing, first and foremost – answering ‘why do we exist and why are we running this business?’. And two dimensions on the process - answering ‘how are we doing it?’.
- The purpose of the business is to solve a sustainability-related problem through an innovation (’sustainability innovation’).
- The business is taking the innovation to the market using an entrepreneurial approach (expressed as ‘creative organizing’).
- The process respects the life-supporting system, or in other words securing the present and coming generations of stakeholders to be able to fulfill their needs (an adaption of the generic expression of what is meant by ’sustainable development’).
Sustainopreneurship – on Wikipedia
From October 17, 2008, Sustainopreneurship was started as an article on Wikipedia, beyond pioneering research efforts in conjunction with world-leading research settings and contexts in both entrepreneurship and sustainable development, placing a firm foundation for future development and deployment of the concept*.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainopreneurship.
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*Note: During 2009 a first draft of a book on topic and concept will be written, one blog post at a time, through a wiki, conversed at a group on a community. Working title: “Sustainopreneurship – Business with a Cause. The Whys, Whats and Hows of Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Sustainability”.
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