Digital Sustainability and Entrepreneurship: How Digital Innovations Are Helping Tackle Climate Change and Sustainable Development

TLDR

Digital technologies enable entrepreneurial organizations to adopt innovative approaches for tackling societal challenges. The study investigates how digital technologies can address climate change and sustainable development and proposes a research agenda for entrepreneurship, business models, and ecosystems. The authors conceptualize digital sustainability activities and examine the digital toolbox used by pioneering organizations to generate new research questions. The authors argue that digital sustainability can drive empirical advances in entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy, yielding positive societal impact.

Abstract

We explore how digital technologies are helping address grand challenges to tackle climate change and promote sustainable development. With digital technologies, entrepreneurial organizations have adopted innovative approaches to tackle seemingly intractable societal challenges. We refer to these broadly as digital sustainability activities. By focusing on the digital toolbox employed by pioneering organizations, we propose a research agenda that generates novel questions for entrepreneurship, business models, and ecosystems as well as new ways of thinking about trust and institutional logics. We believe that digital sustainability can spur empirical advances in entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy with potential for positive impact on society.