ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts ‘green businesses’ (moving an existing firm towards environmental responsibility) with ‘green-green businesses’ (a business designed in process and product to be green as a start-up). The ideal type of ‘ecopreneur’ is defined as one who creates green-green businesses in order to radically transform the economic sector in which he or she operates. Ecopreneurship is an existential form of business behaviour committed to sustainability. Ecopreneurs are counter-cultural or social entrepreneurs who want to make a social statement, not just money. They benefit not only from free advertising, given their advocacy of a public good, but also from a strong sense of individual and team motivation since their objective taps into social and political, as well as economic, needs. The classic examples of Ben & Jerry’s, The Body Shop and the Honey Bee Network are deliberately selected here as perhaps the most ‘ideal typical’ illustrations of ecopreneurship as a form of human behaviour latent in all entrepreneurs who want to get the most wide-ranging benefit from their natural ‘free-rider’ instincts.
Practical suggestions for businesspeople who want to try the ecopreneurial strategy in the private sector are suggested, including green brainstorming, reduction of costs, the stimulation of innovation through green design and networking, and attracting the interest of overwhelmed consumers through green marketing and the funding of the public sector in an emerging ‘attention economy’.
Concrete steps which governments and public officials can take to promote ecopreneurship include competitions for the most imaginative green business plans, changing tax regimes to promote resource conservation, building ecopreneurship into standards for public-sector managers and targeting the creation of high-tech development centres to build serial ecopreneurship and attract ‘blended value’ venture capital.
