Barriers and Triggers to Green Entrepreneurship: An Exploratory Study

Green entrepreneurs have considerable potential to contribute to mastering the pressing environmental problems of our time through the introduction of new, environmentally friendly products (Schaper, 2005) and through catalysing an overall shift of business strategies towards more sustainable products and processes (York and Venkataraman, 2010). The present study extends the current knowledge on barriers and triggers to green entrepreneurship, which is one of the numerous essential fields in the domain of green entrepreneurship that currently remains under-researched and is dominated by qualitative studies. For this purpose novel data from the Flash Eurobarometer Survey No. 342 is used, which constitutes the first large-scale, cross-country dataset of green entrepreneurs that is available for research purposes. The survey has specifically been conducted to examine SMEs’ green activities and allows for a unique measure of nascent green entrepreneurship. This is, the data allows for comparing nascent green entrepreneurs, i.e. entrepreneurs who are planning to introduce green products or services, with entrepreneurs that are not planning to take steps regarding green product or service offerings. For the purpose of generating empirically driven propositions regarding barriers, triggers and combinations of barriers and triggers perceived by nascent green entrepreneurs, descriptive and econometric techniques are applied. Particular attention is paid to barriers and triggers in reach of policy action, so that results may not only form a valuable starting point for further research, but also provide valuable insights for policy makers. Results suggest that there are two barriers that are specifically perceived by nascent green entrepreneurs and that several triggers are perceived as valuable with respect to introducing green products or services. Furthermore, combinations of triggers appear to play a role, which does not seem to hold for barriers. Lastly, results indicate that with respect to both triggers and the possible removal of barriers there seems to be room for policy action.