Configurations of Sustainable Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: How To Support Entrepreneurship for Environmental and Social Development
Summary
This paper is about Sustainable Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, which combines the Entrepreneurial
Ecosystem concept with the Sustainable Entrepreneurship concept, and looks at how a geographical
region can support entrepreneurs interested in sustainable entrepreneurship. This paper researches
which conditions combine in a region to have either a high output or a high share of environmental or
social start-ups. The conditions looked at were incubators, sustainability education, impact investors,
sustainability awareness, governmental sustainability and economic development. This was analyzed
using the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) method on 273 NUTS-2 (European) regions. To
have a high output of either environmental or social start-ups, incubators and impact investors need to
be combined with either sustainability (environmental or social) awareness or GDP per capita. For the
output of social start-ups, a combination of impact investors, social awareness, governmental
sustainability and economic development is also sufficient. For a high percentage of environmental
start-ups, the combination of sustainability education, incubators and impact investors need to be
combined with a high GDP per capita, but also the absence of governmental sustainability. For a high
percentage of social start-ups the social awareness and governmental sustainability conditions are the
most important. These two conditions need to be combined with either the absence of incubators or the
absence of sustainability education. This shows that policy makers need to focus on different
conditions, depending on if they want to have more environmental or more social start-ups.