• Understand and describe the basics of the field of environmental entrepreneurship and distinguish the critiques of and alternatives to the concept.
• Identify the potentials and shortcomings of entrepreneurial efforts to solve environmental problems.
• Discuss and critically evaluate opportunities and limitations of environmental entrepreneurship ventures and initiatives in relation to the climate and environmental crisis.
• Explain and justify their position concerning a specific case of environmental entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship typically focuses on identifying new opportunities for creating value for customers or users and commercially developing those opportunities to establish profitable businesses. Entrepreneurship, however, is in a process of redefinition and is increasingly understood as a way of responding to major societal crises, as individuals, communities, corporations and organizations all over the world experiment with new business models and solutions.

Specifically, with environmental entrepreneurship being proposed as an engine toward a greener economy and a brighter future for humanity, debates have erupted regarding the role of entrepreneurship in problem-solving, some arguing that profitability and environmental concerns cannot coexist, while others identify entrepreneurship as the silver bullet to combat climate change and other environmental issues in the vacuum left by the international political system’s failure to handle an increasingly bleak situation. Still others identify environmental entrepreneurship more broadly as new, alternative forms of organizing, often unrelated to profit; as grassroots initiatives reimagining local communities and less CO₂-intensive ways of living.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the different camps, theories and critical perspectives in the debate about environmental entrepreneurship, enabling the students to analyze motivations, impacts and ethical issues of specific cases of environmental entrepreneurship as well as the broader impact and role of environmental entrepreneurship in society.

The course is part of the series Advanced Studies Electives. It addresses students in their last year of their master who are looking for inspiration for their master theses. The course will introduce the newest research in the field of Environmental Entrepreneurship, including state-of-the-art research debates and questions for potential master theses. 

This course is part of the Sustainable Entrepreneurship Minor. Although the course can be taken as a separate elective, students will benefit from taking it together with the Minor’s two other electives: “Re-imagining Capitalism” and “Revising the Commons, Re-imagining the Collective”. 

Preliminary course literature:

Dean & McMullen 2007: Toward a theory of sustainable entrepreneurship: Reducing environmental degradation through entrepreneurial action

Hall et al. 2010: Sustainable development and entrepreneurship: Past contributions and future directions

Hockerts & Wustenhagen 2010: Greening Goliaths Versus Emerging Davids: Theorizing About the Role of Incumbents and New Entrants in Sustainable Entrepreneurship

York & Venkataraman 2010: The entrepreneur–environment nexus: Uncertainty, innovation, and allocation

Sørensen 2008: ‘Behold, I am making all things new’: The entrepreneur as savior in the age of creativity

Phillips 2012: On being green and being enterprising: narrative and the ecopreneurial self

Latour 2015: Fifty shades of green

Ten Bos & Painter-Morland 2015: Should Environmental Concern Pay Off? A Heideggerian Perspective