ABSTRACT
As the world grapples with multiple interconnected challenges of resource depletion, climate change, and rising socioeconomic inequities, integrating sustainability principles in entrepreneurial practices is no longer a choice, but is a critical necessity. Several alternatives including social entrepreneurship, green entrepreneurship, institutional entrepreneurship, and, more recently, sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) have gained traction in business and sustainability research, to speak to the trilemma of balancing economic growth, environment, and social welfare. Despite the intuitive intrinsic hostility between entrepreneurship and environmentalism, evidence suggests that entrepreneurship has greater potential to sustain environmentalism, in comparison to any other form of imposed reform (Anderson, 1998). Thus, understanding how entrepreneurial value creation extends beyond purely economic goals is important both for developed and developing economy contexts. Historically, entrepreneurship has been primarily associated with costs and profits through risk taking and innovation (Wennekers et al., 2002). Traditional approaches to businesses have although bolstered economic prosperity and innovation; they have been critiqued for their considerable negative externalities on society and ecosystems (Haldar, 2019b). These challenges are even more pronounced in developing nations where rapid urbanisation and industrialisation often comes at the cost of social and environmental injustices (Haldar et al., 2023; Haldar & Sharma, 2022a). The transition towards this novel paradigm of SE presents an opportunity to integrate social, economic, and environmental value in production practices, for both new enterprises and incumbent firms. Hence, challenging the conventional perceptions on profitability and responsible production and innovation, being mutually exclusive. SE - a heterodox phenomenon that embodies elements of different forms of entrepreneurship including - conventional, green, and social entrepreneurship enables us to demonstrate how such innovative entrepreneurial practices are central to inclusive, equitable, and environmentally just transformations in production processes (Hall et al., 2010).
