Configurations of Sustainable Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: How To Support Entrepreneurship for Environmental and Social Development

Abstract

This paper is about Sustainable Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, which combines the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem concept with the Sustainable Entrepreneurship concept, and looks at how a geographical region can support entrepreneurs interested in sustainable entrepreneurship. This paper researches which conditions combine in a region to have either a high output or a high share of environmental or social start-ups. The conditions looked at were incubators, sustainability education, impact investors, sustainability awareness, governmental sustainability and economic development. This was analyzed using the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method on 273 NUTS-2 (European) regions. To have a high output of either environmental or social start-ups, incubators and impact investors need to be combined with either sustainability (environmental or social) awareness or GDP per capita. For the output of social start-ups, a combination of impact investors, social awareness, governmental sustainability and economic development is also sufficient. For a high percentage of environmental start-ups, the combination of sustainability education, incubators and impact investors need to be combined with a high GDP per capita, but also the absence of governmental sustainability. For a high percentage of social start-ups the social awareness and governmental sustainability conditions are the most important. These two conditions need to be combined with either the absence of incubators or the absence of sustainability education. This shows that policy makers need to focus on different conditions, depending on if they want to have more environmental or more social start-ups.