Sustainopreneurship – Business with a Cause

The promise of creative business organizing for sustainability

By Anders Abrahamsson, Freelance/Enactive Researcher, Växjö University, School of

Management and Economics.
Abstract, Book chapter, Work In Progress, FSF, to be published Fall 2008, Örebro, Sweden.
May not be cited without the explicit permission from the author.
Edited version from a paper first presented at the 13th International Sustainable Development Research
Conference, Mälardalens Högskola, Västerås, 10-12 June, 20071.
Keywords: sustainopreneurship, sustainability innovation, sustainability entrepreneurship, research agenda,
research methodology, prospect

Abstract
This chapter suggests a research agenda outlined for further inquiry of the concept sustainopreneurship, and
includes a call for and an invitation to authentic forces to take the concept further in idea, applied
interaction and reflective practice. The concept has been emerging from earlier vocabularies of primarily
eco-preneurship and social entrepreneurship in the nineties, following a trajectory where entrepreneurship
in general has invited itself to extend its context beyond the strictly economical aspect to a social
phenomenon, and now moves beyond to extend itself to place itself in the ecosystem at large following
the holistic world-view sustainability implies. Sustainopreneurship, syntactically, was first introduced in
2000 mainly related to proactive environmental change management processes; the phenomenon
developed semantically with publications in 2003, further evolved and tentatively was defined in 2006,
with an empirical testing and contrasting in 2007.
The context of sustainability sets conditions of complexity, call for urgency and ingenuity, and need for
tangible, real-world results achieved through creative organizing with a holistic mindset from forces
prepared to rise to this challenge. The business world has been nominated as a premier force to create a
sustainable world, especially when acting as a source of innovation and creativity, and it is claimed that
sustainopreneurship could be the accentuating factor to give even more leverage to forces emerging from
the world of business activities to contribute to sustainability. Collectively, these issues motivate a need
for further research on sustainopreneurship.
Sustainopreneurship is primarily distinguished by its purpose orientation, aiming to use creative business
organizing as a means to solve problems related to the sustainability agenda, by taking sustainability
innovations identified as solutions to these problems into businesses. Thus, in the process of doing so,
sustainopreneurial venturing naturally and self-evidently strive to respect the limits and boundaries set by
the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, and its social sub-system including the economical system, in

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This paper has been possible through funding from Forum för Småföretagsforskning: Swedish Foundation for
Small Business Research, http.//www.fsf.se, to which the author gives his thanks.

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order to serve both present and future stakeholders. In short – Business with a Cause. For illustrative
purposes, two cases are introduced, the own sustainopreneurial venturing that the author have been part
of, On a Mission Sweden – Inc. Ass. And Ignition.
Conceptually, this chapter suggests a deeper analysis to be conducted with a nuanced and detailed
taxonomy and framework created of sustainability innovations, the core of sustainopreneurship, primarily
by cataloguing and categorizing case stories. It is also needed to make a more detailed description to relate
sustainopreneurship to other concepts in the wider, general idea-sphere of the “business case of
sustainability”, in the contemporary plethora of “buzz-words”, approaches, methods and acronyms that
already exists – and in this context also to motivate why this concept adds value. Given the context of
this book, it is also tentatively related to the proposed frame developed to bridge functional and territorial
rationales, a virtual integrating framework for (local and) regional dynamics, in order to generate some
bridging research questions in interplay in between this frame and the concept of sustainopreneurship. A
concrete departure is to see how the three different dimensions in the framework facilitates
sustainopreneurial processes.
It is recommended, though, to keep research applied, to identify obstacles and institutional barriers, and
how to overcome them; i. e. facilitating factors for sustainopreneurship, researching prospective tools,
enablers and approaches. Appropriate areas and domains for sustainopreneurship applied should also be
digested. Recommended research methods are “enactive research” and “open space technology”, since they add
instant value among stakeholders, and in themselves naturally builds arenas where sustainopreneurship
evolves and proliferates. For progress, beyond these “how”-related pointers, the key is to single out “the
big questions”, getting answers through collaborative, collective dialogue and conversation, with an
explicit interaction and results orientation. Issues and topics are formulated, where it is of striking
importance with an intention to attract authentic forces potentially hearing this call of exploring the
pheonomenon further, with the purpose collapse the degrees of separation in between the stakeholders of
the sustainopreneurial concept, in idea, reflective practice and applied interaction to generate collective
and collaborative wisdom.