Sustainable Entrepreneurship and its Viability

Sustainability is on the rise in popularity and lucrativeness in today’s world view, but not without additional costs. In order for sustainability to get the push that it needs to become mainstream in the economy, radical changes must occur. The greatest source of such change in a market is entrepreneurship, but is sustainable entrepreneurship valuable enough to pursue? Namely for a breed of economists that thrive on profit-maximization? With that said, the objective is to find out: are sustainability practices related to the viability of sustainable entrepreneurship? This research paper utilized survey data from the SME Policy Panel Measurement (MKB Beleidspanel Meting) from 1975 Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises to determine the answer. CSR in large companies is seeing the majority of the focus in sustainability and profit relationships, which is why this research aims to observe this relationship for the smaller, more populated SME sector. The three pillars of sustainable entrepreneurship - social, environmental and economical - are individually assessed to solve the query through hypotheses formulated for each of these three sustainable factors. Regression analysis is used to observe the relationships between these three pillars and the viability of these SMEs. The results suggest that out of the three factors, the social pillar is positively related to viability. Along with there being no strong relationship between the three factors and viability is the result that there is no evidence for negative associations with pursuing sustainability in SMEs and viability. This research paper concludes that with these results, there should be no reason to reject the pursuit of sustainable entrepreneurship with the growing benefits that it brings, despite its adverseness to the core concept of entrepreneurship and profit maximization.