Users as Innovators in the Context of Sustainable Entrepreneurship - Research Proposal Example

 Users as Innovators in the Context of Sustainable Entrepreneurship Section One: Introduction 1.1 Problem Statement World economies currently process global natural resources then generate waste streams in a manner that commands redesign of the entrepreneurial and innovative activities. Pushed by this need, some entrepreneurs and business entities have tried reconfiguring the way they conduct business or implement business practices that aid in preservation of the global natural resources. Often times, their move is informed by the desire to enhance the social, economic and environmental health of both the current and the future generations. It is on this ground that different world economies like Poland, London and Germany begun treating sustainability as through innovation and entrepreneurship as an issue that needs a national attention. Though this state looks promising in the face of global development, many entrepreneurs and business entities have remained blind to the sustainable development goals that are unique to their individual economies. 1.2 Research Questions and Objectives 1.2.1 Research objectives To establish the level at which different world economies employ sustainable entrepreneurship. To determine the factors underpinning the ability of a sustainable entrepreneurship to end in sustainable development in the social, economic and environmental sphere 1.2.2 Research Question To what extent do world economies employ sustainable entrepreneurship? Does sustainable entrepreneurship automatically lead to sustainable development in economic, social and economic perspectives?  Section Two: Literature Review Murgatroyd (2010) posits that sustainable development needs a deeper comprehension of the sophistication of the global system coupled with creative problem solving skills aimed at finding solutions to the sustainability-related problems. To actualize this, he recommends that economies should reconcile their economic activities with their sustainability goals. Muñoz (2013) describes successful sustainable entrepreneurs and innovators as those that use sustainability-related values like respect for nature, tolerance and equality among others to define their goals, restructure their attitude in addition to offering benchmarks for use in judging their entrepreneurial behaviors. The aforementioned qualities just hint that this new approach to entrepreneurship features is more sophisticated than the conventional counterpart. That notwithstanding, there remains a general lack of understanding on how entrepreneurial and innovative activities actually lead to sustainable development and how the concept of entrepreneurial and innovative sustainability is appreciated all through the globe. Like other business ventures, sustainability oriented business enterprises, also crave for economic profit. Their only distinguishing factor is that their endeavors go past the social, economic or environmental objectives. Often times, they equally combine every perspective of sustainable development in an integral, historical and equal fashion. This in simple terms means that the entrepreneurial activity seeks to simultaneously achieve the aforementioned objectives whilst taking care of the future generation’s well-being, securing the economy and attaining a sustainable environment. In a bid to support this aspect, Patzelt & Shepherd (2010) gave an account that segmented the activities of sustainable entrepreneurship two categories of elements. The first category contained constructs based on literary materials on sustainability and examples include sustain nature, sustain communities and sustain life support systems. The second category is based on literary sources on entrepreneurship and includes societal non-economic gains, individual non-economic gains as well as developing economic gains. However, this manner of classification on what aspect of social, environmental and economic sustainability belongs to what category. In the light of the growing global emphasis as the pathway to job creation and economic development, policy makers have set up desperate measures to promote entrepreneurship. One of the most common among these approaches is the call for education systems to contribute through provision of relevant education programs. Sahlberg & Oldroyd (2010) echo the same message when they argue that drawing a nation towards attaining a socio-economic and environmental sustainability should be extended to the young ones in school. With regards to this, they suggest that the education policies surrounding entrepreneurial studies need to be formulated in a sustainability-conscious fashion. In essence, every knowledge-oriented society should be in a state to leverage knowledge, explore new ideas and collaborate with other people in addition to adaptation to the unseen changes within the economy. So widespread are the forces that push policy makers into raising awareness regarding the impact of education on entrepreneurship and sustainable development. This concern has been in part addressed by bodies that have undertaken campaigns aimed at determining sustainability-conscious education policies. Examples of such campaigns include the campaign by the European Commission in 2002 and the UNESCO Campaign in 2005. Though the recommendations highlighted in this endeavors entail actions deemed fundamental in the respective areas of concern, they do not encourage practitioners and policy makers to pay attention to commonplace elements within these concerns. Interestingly, it is the disregarded elements that have the biggest role to play in the education sector. It is on this ground that Arogundade (2011) insists that education systems need to change in order to curb the unpredictable situations in the contemporary economies. The present trend in the growth of business entities reveals that business growth might in the near future only be attainable by entities that engage in sustainability-conscious entrepreneurial activities. In fact, gone are the days when entrepreneurship would be a pathway to attaining socio-economic growth. Going by the historical records, the incidences of entrepreneurial failures all through the globe insinuate that simple motivation of the entrepreneurial spirit can never suffice. In-depth knowledge of the approaches to engage in business activities, coupled with the appropriate aspects of innovative practices along with superb ideas undoubtedly increase the likelihood of success. Pushed by this entrepreneurial gap, Basu (2014), urges that upcoming economies like India need to develop and promote efficient entrepreneurship education systems. Despite the concept being a practice-oriented matter, he argues that supplementing it with the knowledge about the contemporary issues like environmental sustainability if of great significance. In the United States, President Obama has been at the forefront in terms of laying the foundation for an innovative economy. The Obama Innovation Strategy offers a better reflection of these efforts. In brief, the strategy is founded on Recovery Act funds tuning to $100 billion for provision of extra support for activities like education and infrastructure among others facilities covered in both in the president’s budget and the recovery act. Keathley (2013) describes this move as a way to exploit the natural ingenuity of the Americans plus the ever-changing private sector just to make sure that subsequent economic expansion looks more broad-based, coherent and of a larger number of benefits in comparison with the previous innovative adventures. An even more striking aspect of this move is that it takes shared priority into account while laying the foundation for the innovative endeavors. The pyramid shown in the figure below suffices as an illustration of how the U.S has put national priorities first in its innovative efforts. Source: www.whitehouse.gov From the pyramid, one can clearly see that U.S embraces innovative efforts that deem unleashing a clean energy revolution as one of the innovative strategies embraced by the U.S. This serves as a good example of a nation that upholds sustainability needs while pursuing innovative activities. Considering that sustainable entrepreneurial activities seek to solve societal challenges such as climatic changes in a more profitable manner, the concept intrinsically bears a relationship with innovation, which pursues new ways of doing things in order to make societal operations better. In view of the sophisticated challenges such as sustainable development that constantly befall the contemporary society, there is need for sustainable innovative adventures to explore new problem solving approaches. At the most basic level, the approach chosen should be system-based. DeBoer, Hekkert & Woolthuis (2009) define a system-based approach to sustainability as one that takes longstanding aftermaths of the entrepreneurial activities and every actor within an entrepreneurial chain into account. This raises a concern about the particular competencies that sustainable entrepreneurs plus their employees would require in order to be better placed in terms of innovating and developing their business models and technologies in sustainable ways. Section Three: Research Methodology Wiles (2012) defines qualitative research refers to the exploration of issues, comprehension of a phenomenon and supplying answers to questions through an attempt to analyze and makes sense of an unstructured piece of data. In general, qualitative research is multi-faced in terms of focus and entails a naturalistic plus a subjective approach to a subject matter. Implicit in this is the point that a qualitative researcher will be studying things in their natural occurrence and setting, trying to decipher and interpreting the meaning the study population brings to them. In my opinion I would prefer qualitative research for this study because of the following reasons. First, the study approach gives consideration to context which makes it suitable for issues like sustainable entrepreneurship that often attract varied opinions and action lines. Second, the study approach permits flexibility. For instance, a qualitative study via interviews would allow a researcher to stem other questions from any of the predefined set of questions. This undoubtedly increases the likelihood of the involved researcher to understand the subject under study very well. Such a degree of flexibility works well for a topic like sustainability whose perception varied across varied environmental, social and economic contexts. Finally, the research question in this paper command more of a qualitative study compared to the quantitative counterpart that lacks aspects like human perception and flexible questions that can help to keep false representations at bay. The qualitative study approach in this paper revolves around content analysis of the movie clip Alex Steffen Sees a Sustainable Future traceable at the TED talk website. The source video employed in this study helps to answer the research question in the following ways. First of all, it gives details of how the human race has remained blind to the sustainable development goals of the global economy whilst warning that the situation could get worse if corrective measures are not put in place beforehand. Second, the video suggests the use of new tools models and ideas as the only way to alleviate the challenges that face sustainable entrepreneurship and innovation. Third, the source video gives details of how the global economy is gradually turning into a sustainable unit because of innovative technologies and units. Finally, the video highlights of the factors that would influence the success level of entrepreneurial and innovative adventures in the context of attaining sustainable development within the economies all through the globe. Section Four: Findings Steffen issues a video talk that offers an insight into what it really means to attain a sustainable global economy. He bases his argument of sustainability on two flaws that are domineering within the contemporary society. One of the flaws that he mentions with regards to this is the point that the society feature ecological footprints. This in simple terms means that it has a measurable impact on the planet. More specifically, the measurement focuses on the stuff that go through the life of the populace and the waste that is left behind them. Unfortunately, the present society has an unsustainable degree of this. The second problem is that the planet we have is used in an extremely unfair way. Individuals basically lack sufficient resources for survival. As a consequence, the trend has brought about every sort of tension thus breeding disturbance. At the worst, the world population is daily increasing so the impact could be felt even the more in the near future. Steffen adds that kids are currently brought up whilst seeing a dynamic society and they could crave for more of that type of lifestyle when they grow old, even if it will means putting sustainable development at stake. Nonetheless, the society might not be entirely set to blame for the reason that a significant portion of the world populace still lacks knowledge about what sustainability really entails. Ideally, a sustainable economy is one that features an environment that is shareable with all individuals in the planet, capable of promoting stability, democracy plus human rights and attainable within the time-period needed to alleviate the upcoming challenges. To attain this, he suggests the use of ideas, models and tools that can be widely leveraged in order to drive nations closer to attaining sustainable development. Interestingly, the approaches and tools that head to a sustainable nation are in many cases things that the society has heard of or had and encounter with. The video sites Portland and one of the nations in which sustainable development has significantly taken roots. In particularly, the nation has afforded to bind the city with a line so as to have nature and city sandwiching each other. Accomplishment of such activities paves way for every kind of investment including the enhancement of transport systems to move people in reasonably comfortable and effective manners. Another example is the London-based Beddington Zero Energy Development which stands out as the greenest building all through the globe. The building serves as an illustration of how certain economies have shown commitment towards setting up buildings capable of generating their own electricity, recycling a significant portion of their water, using natural light and offering a heightened level of comfort to the occupants. To conclude, Steffen identifies factors behind the success level of sustainable development efforts include operating within political realities, employment of cultural tools to spread news about sustainability, use of top-edge technologies and adoption of intellectual property systems that encourage collaboration. Discussion and Conclusion One striking thing is the point that realizing a bright green future is imperative for every nation if bettering the life of the human kind is anything to go by. It is impressive that economies all through the globe have laid down strategies to ensure that entrepreneurial and innovative activities are in harmony with the sustainability needs of their economies. The Beddington Zero Energy Development in London, the nature-city concept in Poland, the Obama Innovative Strategy in the United States all serve as good illustrations of such kinds of efforts. However, the entrepreneurial and innovative activities undertaken by certain economies lack direction in sense that whereas several entrepreneurial activities are aimed at realizing a better dwelling place in terms of economic, social and environmental stabilities, there is no main focus as pertains to the particularly activities that can draw nations towards attaining their sustainability goals. A reflection on the amount of energy used to pursue innovative activities along with the negative economic aftereffects that results from their uncontrolled use can serve as examples of how the society still lacks focus of the pathway to attaining sustainable economies. Environmental experts like Steffen have taken advantage of this economic gap to make the society know the benefits that can befall economies that take sustainability seriously. Moreover, Steffen has also highlighted factors that underpin the success level of innovativeness and entrepreneurship as far as realizing sustainable economies is concerned. Particular issues that have been mentioned in this study include technology, cultural issues, political factors and intellectual property systems. Apparently, this message concurs with the urge by certain research studies that nations need to treat sustainable adventures in a broad-based sense (Patzelt & Shepherd, 2010). To conclude, economies thriving towards attaining sustainable development should borrow a leaf from the far that sustainability-conscious entrepreneurial activities have taken the likes of London and America to. Also to be taken into account is the need to streamline the entrepreneurial activities with the overall sustainability goals that are unique to a given nation. Underpinning this is the point that entrepreneurial activities should cater for issues like political environmental, cultural issues and technological revolutions as a way to make sure that every sustainability-related investment can benefit the present and the future state of the members of a country. References Alex Steffen. Alex Steffen Sees A Sustainable Future. TED [online]. Available from: http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_steffen_sees_a_sustainable_future.html [2015 May 15th] Arogundade, B. B. (2011). Entrepreneurship education: An imperative for sustainable development in Nigeria. Journal of emerging trends in educational research and policy studies, 2(1), 26-29. De Boer, S., Hekkert, M., & Woolthuis, R. K. (2009). Strategies of sustainable entrepreneurs to influence the innovation system. DIME working paper. Keathley, J. (2013). The executive guide to innovation: Turning good ideas into great results. Murgatroyd, S. (2010) ‘Wicked problems’ and the work of the school, European Journal of Education, 45, pp. 259–279. Sahlberg, P., & Oldroyd, D. (2010). Pedagogy for economic competitiveness and sustainable development. European Journal of education, 45(2), 280-299. Basu, R. (2014). Entrepreneurship Education in India: A Critical Assessment and a Proposed Framework. Technology Innovation Management Review, 4(8). Lans, T., Blok, V., Wesselink, R. (2013) Learning apart and together: towards an integrated competence framework for sustainable entrepreneurship in higher education. Journal of Cleaner Production 30 Muñoz, P. (2013). The Distinctive Importance of Sustainable Entrepreneurship. Current Opinion in Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2(1). Patzelt, H. and Shepherd, D. (2010) Recognizing opportunities for sustainable development. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 35(4): 631-652 Wiles, R. (2012). What are qualitative research ethics? London: Bloomsbury Academic. Read More