Being green has never been as omnipresent as nowadays. Finite resources, growing population, natural resources degradation, and biodiversity loss to name some examples are reasons why major changes towards greener strategies in the economy are needed (Volery, 2015). Although research in the field of sustainable entrepreneurship has increased in the past two decades, no clear definition of ecopreneurship is existing yet. Many different terms are used to describe a similar concept (Gast, Gundolf, and Cesinger, 2017). It is self-explanatory that ecological sustainable entrepreneurship is a subfield of entrepreneurship, but the relation to social entrepreneurship gets blurry. With the help of a systematic literature review and interviews with experts, the question of how ecological sustainable entrepreneurship, which in the following is named ecopreneurship, can be defined as a subfield of entrepreneurship, is answered. The results of the literature review are analyzed with the focus on similarities and differences in definitions and put into context in a concept map to create a new and clearer definition of ecopreneurship. Furthermore interviews with experts in research and the industry are used to verify the newly formed definition and compare the findings in the literature with how researchers and practitioners see the field. Throughout the analysis, the question of how ecopreneurship differentiates from social entrepreneurship, is present. A detailed analysis of the relations between sustainability-related subforms of entrepreneurship brings better insights on how ecopreneurship is linked to social entrepreneurship. In summary defining ecopreneurship is di cult, because some characteristics can be interpreted in many dfferent ways depending on the perspective it is looked at. Findings in the literature are very much in line with how researchers and practitioners see and define the field. Nevertheless, different approaches towards ecopreneurship result in slightly different characteristics of ecopreneurship. This work provides future researchers with a clear defini- tion of what ecopreneurship is and how it is related to concepts like social entrepreneurship, sustainability entrepreneurship and traditional entrepreneurship.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-218280 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Lenczuk, Hannah |
| Publisher | KTH, Skolan för datavetenskap och kommunikation (CSC) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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