Sustainable entrepreneurship: action nets, affordances and alignment

Abstract: Sustainable entrepreneurship as the realization of sustainability innovations has been regarded by researchers and practitioners as a means of combating environmental challenges. While there has been substantial research within the field of sustainable entrepreneurship, existing research is not able to represent the empirical complexity of sustainable entrepreneurship, especially regarding startups’ embeddedness in their ecosystems and concrete entrepreneurial activities. To account for this complexity, the concept of ecosystem alignment for the realization of innovations has been mobilized in this study. However, current ecosystem research focuses on how large firms achieve alignment to realize their innovations by orchestrating other actors in their ecosystem. Therefore, this study aims to explain how entrepreneurs, despite their naturally limited resources, are able to realize their sustainability innovations through ecosystem alignment. For this purpose, a number of Swedish environmentally sustainable startups were studied, mainly through interviews. To explain how entrepreneurs achieve ecosystem alignment, the concepts of action nets and material affordances are utilized, and the following conclusions are drawn. First, they do so by mutual alignment with customers and partners as well as alignment to investors in their ecosystem. Second, they align through joint actions whose connections and translations can be depicted in action nets. Third, most of the joint actions and translations are enabled through material affordances. Fourth, to achieve ecosystem alignment, the entrepreneurs have to manage the risks associated with alignment for the involved actors. Finally, ecosystem alignment can be regarded as a cause-effect relationship with action nets as causes and risk mitigation and alignment as effects. If entrepreneurs are able to generate temporary alignment in all action nets simultaneously, ecosystem alignment is achieved and sustainability innovations can be realized.