ABSTRACT
Sustainable entrepreneurship is drawing considerable interest from both scholars and practitioners. The first words of the title of the seminal article by Shepherd and Patzelt (2011) can help us to understand the reason for this interest: “The New Field of Sustainable Entrepreneurship.” Since this feeling of novelty is shared by many other works (Lans et al., 2014; Pinkse and Groot, 2015; Poldner et al., 2015), it is interesting to analyze its source. Since the earliest works by Richard Cantillon and Adam Smith in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, entrepreneurship has long been the subject of wide discussion. However, it is only in the last few years that it has become associated with sustainability: “Sustainable entrepreneurship is focused on the preservation of nature, life support and community in the pursuit of perceived opportunities to bring into existence future products, processes and services for gain” (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011, 137). Sustainable entrepreneurship is still about developing products and services in order to obtain a profit but restraint is required in order not to deplete the environment. Sustainable entrepreneurship must bring about externalities that constitute non-economic gains. That is why sustainable entrepreneurship is understood as a new concept; it adds to classical entrepreneurship a dimension of sustainability that is related to a new approach to both the long-term consequences of activities and concerns about the environment. Because sustainable entrepreneurship seeks social improvement, it stems from a distinctive origin – social entrepreneurship, which is dedicated to projects aimed at social progress. Unlike “classic” for-profit entrepreneurship, economic considerations are seen as a constraint that must be coped with. To sum up, while classic entrepreneurship is focused on economic gain and social entrepreneurship on non-economic gain, sustainable entrepreneurship concentrates on both. Unlike many works that compare sustainable entrepreneurship with for-profit entrepreneurship, this chapter analyzes it in comparison to social entrepreneurship and asks not only what new perspectives allow sustainable entrepreneurship but also how our knowledge of social entrepreneurship can improve the practice of sustainable entrepreneurship.
