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Summary Notes for Sustainable Entrepreneurship Exam
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Summary of all relevant content from seminars, lectures, and readings for the Sustainable Entrepreneurship Exam.
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Week 1Lecture 1
Sustainable entrepreneurship → is focused on the preservation of nature, life support and community in
the pursuit of perceived opportunities to bring into existence future products, processes, and services for
gain, where gain is broadly constructed to include economic and non-economic gains to individuals, the
economy and society
- Examination of how opportunities to bring into existence future goods and services are
discovered, created, and exploited, by whom, and with what economic, psychological, social, and
environmental consequences.
- Primary focus - economic and environmental components
Sustainable entrepreneurship defined to be → the process of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting
economic opportunities that are present in market failures which detract from sustainability, including
those that are environmentally relevant.
What is to be sustained?
- Nature → refers to phenomena of the physical world and includes the earth, biodiversity and
ecosystems and can have intrinsic value over and above it as a simply a life support system
- Sources of life support → environment as a soruce of resources and services for the utilitarian
life support of humankind
- Communities → What makes communities distinctive (and therefore contribute to identity) is
their culture, groups, and places, and to the extent these are threatened, community might be lost;
Communities refer to a complex web of relationships between a set of individuals who share
values, norms, meanings, history, and identity; By being able to maintain a culture within the
larger society, individuals can secure their personal identity (e.g. tourism is one activity that
thretaens places)
What is to be developed?
- Economic gain → An economics perspective emphasizes the development of economic gains for
the actor and/or the society; For example, developing economic gains enhances the
socioeconomic status of people and leads to improved emotional, psychological, and physical
health
- Non-economic gains to individuals → Non-economic gains to be developed in individuals
include child survival, life expectancy, education, equity, and equal opportunity
- Non-economic gains to society → While gains to society include gains for individuals living in
that society, they differ from individual gains because the latter may only be available to a few
individuals while societal gains are available to all (or the vast majority of ) societal members
,Sustainable entrepreneurship is not:
- Sustaining without simultaneously developing
- Developing without simultaneously sustaining
- The link between sustaining and developing does not involve discovery, creation, or exploitation
of future goods, processes or services
Sustainable decision-making:
- Entrepreneurial decisions are sustainable to the extent that they prioritize the preservation of
nature, life support, and community
- For entrepreneurs to make sustainable decisions ultimately means that they prioritize “the
environment first, society second, and economics third
- Cognitive factors, such as values, prior knowledge, motivation and self-efficacy
Affective factor → Compassion → a powerful prosocial motivator characterized by other-orientation
and an emotional connection to others in suffering. Compassion is a primary source of moral thought and
action and has been shown to drive both pro-social and pro-environmental behavior.
Compassion is defined → as the emotional response of caring for and wanting to alleviate suffering; is a
distinct effective state and trait that emerged evolutionarily to facilitate the protection of vulnerable
offspring and to enable cooperation between non-kin
- compassion yields a cost-benefit analysis focused on the other rather than oneself
- compassion also facilitates integrative thinking, thereby incorporating the larger potential
consequences of one's decision making on their surroundings
- compassion implies an emotional connection to suffering and therefore increases commitment to
actually reducing that suffering
,Seminar 1
Market theory & entrepreneurship theory:
- Suggest that the magnitude of potential opportunities for sustainable entrepreneurship
corresponds to the level of degradation of economically valuable environmental resources.
- Many environmental assets or natural resources (such as the atmosphere) have characteristics
which make them less amenable to market allocation
- The further away a market is from perfect, the further is it away from equilibrium, and the more
entrepreneurial the opportunities that exist.
4 types of market imperfections (that lead to opportunities for entrepreneurs):
1. Inefficient frims → evidence is mounting that firms (and consumers) are only meeting a fraction
of the potential efficiencies available from natural resources
- Circular entrepreneurs
- Maximizing efficiency
2. Externalities exist → improving previous negative externalities by using new technologies
- E.g. one farm using pesticides and the other doesn't
- Substituting current practices with technologies and supply chain services that minimize,
nullify, or even improve on earlier negative externalities generates opportunities or new
ventures and may even generate positive environmental externalities
- It holds that one firm’s actions have no impact on the well-being of bystanders.
Externalities exist when costs or benefits are not accurately reflected in the prices of
products and services due to downstream (and, as we argue below, upstream) effects of a
firm’s behavior
- Can be positive → occurs when a third party benefits from the production or
consumption of a good without incurring the full costs corresponding to the true value of
the benefit received; negative → occur when a third party incurs the costs resulting from
the production or consumption of products and services without receiving equivalent
benefits
3. Flawed pricing mechanisms
- Disruptive technologies - Disruptive technologies are initially technically inferior to
those in mainstream markets, used in less demanding applications or sold to customers
normally not inclined to buy high end products; they tend to represent opportunities
missed by established firms focused on profitable growth through technological
advancement; provide opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs to enter a market under
the radar screen of established players, enabling them to build market share to the point
where they can become a challenge to established firms
- Misusing and not charising natural resources by undervaluing them and underpricing
them
- Conventional economics theory assumes that natural resources are infinitely plentiful
and that they have a market value that accurately reflects supply and demand. The reality,
however, is that many natural resources are exhaustible, undervalued and underpriced."
- As we move closer to the ideal of perfectly pricing natural resources, that is, as we value
and price natural resources more accurately, we will likely see demand for the use of
, nonrenewable factors of production decline, while demand for more renewable factors
increases.
4. Information asymmetries→ The persistence of imperfect information across markets has
contributed significantly to unsustainable production and consumption patterns
- “We are too rational”
- It occurs when individuals possess different information with respect to resources,
markets and opportunities
- E.g. lack of knowledge on the part of the consumer creates a market imperfection leading
consumers to make uninformed buying decisions, often at the cost of both the
environment and their pocketbooks.
Identifying environmental problem areas:
Goal → first step in starting a sustainable venture is identifying a problem that you want to address with
your venture.
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