Diving into venture creation : An exploratory study of how external enabler combinations facilitate sustainable venture creation in the marine sector

Abstract: Rapidly increasing global environmental changes are causing disruptions in the natural environment and have resulted in emphasized importance of developing sustainable entrepreneurship to mitigate climate change. To do this, however, external conditions have been argued to stimulate new business opportunities, which have been reconceptualized as external enablers (Davidsson, 2015). This study will therefore investigate how combinations of external enablers can be understood and leveraged to facilitate new sustainable venture creation within one of the sectors with the potential to reverse climate change, the marine sector. Thus, the aim of this study is to assess the combinations of external enablers that facilitate venture creation within the marine sector. The study was conducted in accordance with the interpretivist approach, basing the data collection on multiple case studies. The case studies were based on secondary online data and semi-constructed interviews, where the data was later analyzed through a coding process according to Gioia et al., (2013). The study was set to follow an inductive approach.  The empirical findings show that the prominent external enabler combinations for sustainable ventures within the marine sector are of the regulatory, economic and sociocultural types which have a complementary relationship and act in symbiosis. The symbiosis is in turn affected by climate change as a fundamental enabling factor for sustainable ventures.