How entrepreneurship can help save the planet

This post was written by Professor David A Kirby, a retired UK academic who is an Honorary Professor at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) and Almaty Management University in Kazakhstan.

• The problem: Urgent action is needed to address the problem of climate change.

• Why it matters: Entrepreneurship is largely responsible for the problem, but it can also help solve it.

• The solution: A new approach is needed that integrates profit, people and planet.

"Some have questioned whether entrepreneurship and sustainability are compatible, while others have searched for a new entrepreneurship business model."

The week commencing 7th November 2021 was Global Entrepreneurship Week 2021. Introduced initially in the UK as National Enterprise Week, by Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early 2000s, it was intended to promote and encourage entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, particularly amongst young people. In 2008, it transformed into Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), with a similar objective.

In 2021 GEW coincided with the UN’s COP26 (the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties) in Glasgow, where world leaders considered how and when to address the issue of climate change, 18-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden led a protest calling for urgent action, and a 16-year-old female Indian entrepreneur, Vinisha Umashankar, explained and demonstrated how entrepreneurship and the innovativeness of the human population can address the environmental problems the world is facing.

Vinisha was a finalist in the recent Earthshot Prize competition hosted by HRH The Duke of Cambridge, after developing a pushbike ironing cart that uses solar electricity to heat the iron. It will not only reduce the air pollution created by India’s 10 million traditional ironing carts that burn charcoal but also reduce deforestation and the number of deaths caused by air pollution.

However, this is not the case with all entrepreneurship. While it has the power to bring about change and improvement, traditionally it has focused on wealth creation and job generation, often at the expense of both people and the planet. More recently such new approaches as social entrepreneurship (focusing on society), ecopreneurship (the environment) and humane entrepreneurship (people) have been introduced but, separately, have had relatively little impact on the sustainability challenge per se. As a consequence, some have questioned whether entrepreneurship and sustainability are compatible, while others have searched for a new entrepreneurship business model.

According to Kirby and El Kaffass (2021), this failure on the part of entrepreneurship is because the planet is a system and the problem cannot be solved simply by addressing one aspect of it. Hence they have introduced a new model, Harmonious Entrepreneurship, that is based on systems thinking and applies the Principle of Harmony as espoused by HRH The Prince of Wales and others. Apart from introducing a new business model that has a triple bottom line of profit-planet-people (Elkington, 1999), the primary intention is to train people to launch new, innovative startups that address the sustainability challenge.

One planet, one approach

A similar approach has been advocated by HRH The Prince of Wales in the Terra Carta, which he introduced at the One Planet Summit in Paris on 11th January 2021. This is a 10-point Sustainability Charter intended to harness “the transformative innovation and resources of the private sector” in order to “bring Prosperity in harmony with Nature, People or Planet”. Like Harmonious Entrepreneurship, it:

• Recognises the importance of “local”;
• Treats the ecosystem as one common system and addresses its individual elements simultaneously;
• Acknowledges the need for a skilled workforce and cadre of leaders;
• Broadens the definition of sustainability so that it does not just focus on climate change but on equality, nature, people, planet and prosperity.

Apart from adopting a more Harmonious Entrepreneurial approach to their activities, therefore, government agencies need to encourage the creation of harmonious enterprises in the area under their jurisdiction, as well as the transformation of established enterprises. This means that instead of focusing on Friedman’s (1970) mantra that the responsibility of business is “to make as much money as possible”, there is a need to focus more on what he actually said. For the past 50 years or more the objective of business has been profit maximisation and shareholder satisfaction, when what Friedman actually said was that businesses should “make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of society, both those embodied in the law and those embodied in ethical custom”. In short, the expectation is that businesses should behave ethically and focus on both the_ “economic and non-economic gains to individuals, economy and society”_ (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011). Inevitably this will require a mindset change and probably re-skilling, which will take time but is an urgent priority.

Rather than wait for the global leaders to decide, the public sector needs to act and begin to initiate change by encouraging the growth of new start-up Harmonious Enterprises and encouraging existing ventures to transform into them. If it does so then it is to be expected that “all things under the sun will flourish when harmony prevails.” (Xun Zi, 314-217 BC)

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