Environmental entrepreneurship as a multi‐component and dynamic construct: Duality of goals, environmental agency, and environmental value creation

TLDR

Environmental entrepreneurship has attracted attention as a potential solution to major environmental challenges, yet the field lacks a unified definition, which hampers its legitimacy and theoretical progress. The study aims to provide an integrative theoretical conceptualization of EE to bridge fragmented views. The authors conduct a systematic literature review and inductively analyze existing definitions, proposing EE as a multi‑component, dynamic construct comprising duality of goals, environmental agency, and environmental value creation. This new conceptualization may unify the literature and enhance theoretical development of environmental entrepreneurship.

Abstract

Abstract Environmental entrepreneurship (EE) is a scholarly field that has gained traction in recent years under the premise that it might represent a solution to pressing environmental grand challenges. Despite substantial advances in recent decades, the field still lacks consensus on the conceptualization of EE. The lack of a settled and unified notion of EE hinders the progress of the field because it challenges EE’s legitimacy, hampers theoretical development, creates measurement, and empirical problems. In this study, we aim to provide an integrative theoretical conceptualization of EE that can help build bridges between fragmented views of the phenomenon. First, we perform a systematic literature review to identify existing definitions of EE, and second, we follow an inductive approach to analyze them. Drawing on past definitions, we propose EE as a multi‐component and dynamic construct that consists of three interrelated core components: duality of goals, environmental agency, and environmental value creation. This conceptualization of EE might help connect the fragmented literature and build internal coherence, and it could be instrumental to further developing the current theoretical approaches that inform the phenomenon.