These days, issues such as environmental degradation, the wealth gap, and unequal access to opportunities and resources are increasing. These concerns have increased the need for sustainable entrepreneurship, defined as sustainable business practices. Entrepreneurship is central in transitioning towards a more sustainable future, whereas aligning the social, economic, and ecological objectives and ecological entrepreneurs plays a role. This scoping literature review analyzes the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and the extent of the holistic integration in the global business arena, therefore filling a gap in the existing literature. It aims to analyze the depth of existing pieces of literature on sustainable entrepreneurship, its definitions, and its applications in business practices. The analysis relies upon a literature search on the SCOPUS database around the keywords ‘Sustainability’ and ‘Sustainable Entrepreneurship’. The scientific software VOSviewer is used to better illustrate the linkage of major categories and correspondent trends, related with both business growth and maintenance of ecological systems. It concludes that the desired levels of sustainability require collaborations between all stakeholders, while the transition towards service-oriented business models has contributed to the growth of sustainable entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, existing institutional structures favor current unsustainable businesses and systems over the newer sustainable ones, demanding ecopreneurs to initiate institutional changes
Despite the economic development occurring worldwide, there has been an increase in economic, societal, and environmental threats. Natural resources’ depletion and the adverse consequences of environmental degradation, including a lack of sufficient freshwater, loss of biodiversity, and draught, have become critical problems [
1].
In addition, climate change is threatening the survival and stability of modern societies. More people are dying of hunger and living in poverty. The wealth gap is increasing, and gender inequalities and unequal access to opportunities and resources are persistent [
2].
These issues, among others, of different intensity according to context, have increased the need for sustainable entrepreneurship. Schaltegger and Wagner [
3] define sustainable entrepreneurship as a business approach in which businesses engage in sustainable business practices to achieve efficiency and competitiveness by balancing the impacts of their environmental, business, and social activities. It involves discovering, creating, and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities that generate social and environmental benefits to the communities to promote sustainability [
4].
Sustainable entrepreneurs eliminate traditional business practices, systems, and processes and replace them with superior social and environmental products and services [
5]. In this case, conventional market structures, production techniques, products, and consumption patterns associated with unsustainability are destroyed in favor of more sustainable ones.
Given the significant role of businesses in society and the impacts of their practices, entrepreneurship plays a critical role in transitioning towards a more sustainable future. It is associated with economic and non-economic activities that trigger the creation of jobs and enhanced products and services demanded by global societies [
6]. Thus, entrepreneurship’s influence is enormous and can be optimized to facilitate a transformation towards sustainability.
While traditional entrepreneurship promotes economic development, sustainable entrepreneurship focuses on aligning the social, economic, and ecological objectives [
7]. Rodgers [
8] found that there is a development of a typology of ecopreneurs, whom he defines as “a new breed of eco-conscious change agents who may be called ecological entrepreneurs” [
8] (p. 126). They include organizations and individuals who popularize eco-friendly ideas and innovations through the market or non-market strategies.
Sustainable development and the future depend on such entrepreneurs and their influence on other investors and the general public to adopt sustainable practices. This scoping literature review analyzes the concepts that constitute the field of sustainable entrepreneurship and the extent of their integration in the global business landscape.
It is noteworthy that the role of sustainable entrepreneurship cannot be appreciated outside of the contextual characteristics of the operational environments—in which it innovates—including the markets and other institutional/regulatory factors. Faced with different environmental constraints, entrepreneurs tend to demonstrate distinct sustainability concerns, due to likewise distinct levels of interaction with different external actors to acquire tangible and intangible assets from the external environment in order to keep up with the competition.
Unfortunately, with respect to the aforementioned discussion, limited evidence is presented by previous authors and obtaining a comprehensive review in a holistic manner is rare. Thus, the present scoping literature review is opportune in this context as it aims to holistically map and integrate traditional entrepreneurship literature with further sustainability issues, while it identifies gaps in the topic.
