Towards Sustainable Entrepreneurship Holistic Construct

Abstract

In recent years, conducted businesses have been increasingly expected to obtain more sustainable forms, with many added determinants. Indeed, sustainability-related entrepreneurship still faces complex choices among conventional entrepreneurial factors, while being urged to consider three main pillars of sustainability. Thus, this work is focused on the development of sustainability-related entrepreneurship by reflecting the sustainable needs of entrepreneurship. Due to the fact that it is not clear for the sustainability-related entrepreneurship what the valuable and most influential factors stimming its development are, the detection of basic components and their correlation becomes a major motivation of this work. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct an attempt to identify a comprehensive set of SE (sustainable entrepreneurship) factors providing a structural overview in making insights into the factors/determinants of SE. It assists researchers and entrepreneurs in obtaining clear, informative pictures about SE factors. The applied research methodology is based on a systematic literature review which is conducted using the PRISMA methodology, simultaneously ensuring repetitiveness and lack of bias in this process. To retrieve and condense the immense amount of bibliographic information, a bibliometric analysis is adopted to perform in co-occurrence analysis of keywords determining SE factors and different detailed forms of distribution analysis. The expected outcome is to provide the classification schema of applied keywords in sustainable entrepreneurship literature as part of a comprehensive literature review, which is presented in order to uncover, classify and systematize the current research. As a result, a co-word matrix of high frequency keywords of SE factors is also established. It offers a feasible path of investigation for researchers aiming to build a consistent body of knowledge about sustainable entrepreneurship, by providing a conceptualization and systematization that can be applied across the many contexts in which sustainable entrepreneurship is expressed, for example, sustainable actions and sustainable development contexts. The present research aims to yield a successful attempt of identifying the comprehensive set of SE factors, as well as to establish a co-word matrix of high frequency keywords of SE factors. Providing a macroscopic overview of the main factors of SE in the form of conceptualization of the proposed construct will capture the unique organizational characteristics of sustainable enterprises and facilitate the research into capability building, innovation and competitive advantage in sustainable enterprises. It supports both researchers and entrepreneurs in shaping up and refining future research activities and investments in line with the policy of SE.