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Do individuals who are concerned by issues of sustainability also exhibit strong entrepreneurial intentions? Given that existing imperfections in the market create numerous opportunities for entrepreneurship connected with sustainable development, adding individual sustainability orientation to models of entrepreneurial intention could increase their explanatory power. Based on survey data collected from students and alumni of a German technical university, we provide evidence that entering sustainability orientation into the equation is actually meaningful. However, our findings suggest that the positive impact of sustainability orientation vanishes with business experience. Consequently, we suggest measures to nourish an evidently existing potential for sustainable entrepreneurship.
Introduction
Entrepreneurship is usually associated with numerous promises. From a policy-makers vantage point, entrepreneurial behavior of economic actors within an economy is supposed to increase the competitiveness of that economy in global markets while at the same time potentially creating new employment opportunities. From the perspective of an individual entrepreneur, exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities can be attractive because such opportunities bring with them the promise of a meaningful career and the potential of harvesting superior entrepreneurial rents.
The emerging stream of academic literature on sustainable entrepreneurship1 adds a new dimension to this promise. Not only is entrepreneurship for sustainable development supposed to result in economic success. Sustainable entrepreneurs manage to the "triple bottom line" (Elkington 1997), in other words they balance economic health, social equity and environmental resilience through their entrepreneurial behavior. Sustainable entrepreneurship is thus not only associated with the promise of more traditional concepts of entrepreneurship, but also has additional potential both for society and the environment. Against this background, the recent upsurge of writing in this field is far from surprising. The topic of entrepreneurship for sustainable development lies at the nexus of innovation, sustainability concerns and entrepreneurship and has emerged as an intensively debated subject moving increasingly from journals focused on environmental management (e.g. Schaltegger 2002) to mainstream business and entrepreneurship journals (e.g. Cohen and Winn 2007; Dean and McMullen 2007). The phenomenon itself, however, is far from being a new one; history provides numerous examples of entrepreneurs pursuing sustainable business models as early as the 19th century (Anderson and Leal 1997). Yet, due to its emergent character, to date most contributions have naturally remained conceptual or have reported results of...