ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an Austrian perspective on true innovation for sustainability, taking a step towards creating a comprehensive framework to systematically analyze and understand success factors of startup companies that have set complex sustainability as standard and prerequisite for their respective business practice. The core of our research goes way deeper than e.g. one of today's most popular tools for business modelling, the Business Model Canvas by Osterwalder and Pigneur. Literature on sustainability in economics, business models for sustainability and entrepreneurial cognition is reviewed to shed light on how these areas have been dealt with separately. The terms “sustainability” and “sustainable”, although widespread and commonly used these days by politics, business, media and in daily conversation do not have a single clear definition – they “mean different things to different people”. The aspect of self-consciousness includes the ability, desire and active pursuit of reflecting on actions, especially in the sustainability context of entrepreneurial activity and corporate culture.
