Overhead shot of algae in river. Photo credit: Tom Fisk via Pexels.com (No attribution required).
Our lunch, of course, was plant-based. As the spring weather was unseasonably warm, Jesse [1] and I sat outside on benches in a park near the new East London headquarters of her young climate technology start-up and continued to chat, pausing now and then to wipe our mouths of the lemon tahini sauce that dripped with every bite of falafel. This move was possible thanks to the early-stage funding that their venture had raised last year. Yet, with these extra resources also came new responsibilities. Investors demanded clarity on the venture’s growth strategy and expected to see supportive metrics by the end of the financial quarter. Her expanding team – now with fresh graduate student hires keen to apply their time, enthusiasm, and data science skills – required daily guidance and coordination. Then, there were the founders’ families, who, for the most part, still wholeheartedly supported the venture’s mission (some missed dinners notwithstanding), but could not be expected to wait forever for the team’s working schedule to settle into a more regular routine.
Two entrepreneurs with post-it notes. Photo credit: Anna Shvets via Pexels.com (No attribution required).
Group of entrepreneurs with laptop. Photo credit: William Fortunato via Prexels.com (No attribution required).
With my recorder set aside, our conversation wove between the various short-term challenges her team faced in building a competitive yet responsible start-up, and deeper questions shaping its future. Her concerns were varied but typical of other climate technology founders I had interviewed: determining fair compensation for new hires; weighing whether to undergo the Benefit Corporation (B-Corps) certification process to signal their venture’s pro-social and environmental values to the outside world, despite the significant work that would be involved; evaluating whether the market had become too crowded within their niche of software-based carbon emissions tracking.
"As I listened to Jesse’s concerns, it was apparent that her core values and desire to create a cleaner, safer, and healthier future were deeply embedded in how she was leading her venture, orienting its direction like a navigational north star."
Group of entrepreneurs with post-it notes. Photo credit: Mikhail Nilov via Prexels.com (No attribution required).
In studying entrepreneurship, scholars seek to better understand how opportunities to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated, and pursued, as well as who does it, and with what effects. [2] With their mission to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, climate technology entrepreneurs take on the daunting task of imagining future realities for society while simultaneously managing the logistics of designing and constructing them – all amid multiplying social, economic, and environmental crises. Their tools are the organisational strengths and structures of business, which they wield as bridge builders between our present and this desired future. Through my research as a PhD candidate in Management, I have spent the past four years working with founders like Jesse who are undaunted by this challenge. A growing, global community of value- and belief-aligned practitioners are increasingly working together to balance the challenges of identifying and scaling valuable new technologies while also consciously engaging with broader and sometimes conflicting debates on where, and how, these bridges should be built. In doing so, many seek to replace existing products, services, and infrastructure with those that are both financially successful and climate just, rejecting received ways of how successful business “should” be done. Instead, founders are drawing on these personally held – yet communally aligned – core values and beliefs to guide the creation of revised blueprints for how to “do” responsible business.
Entrepreneur in industrial area. Photo credit: Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels.com (No attribution required).
Many former business “bridges” now under scrutiny were erected using standards holding that the primary purpose of a corporation is maximising financial returns for shareholders. This belief, central to early modern ventures like the Dutch East India Company and later codified in seminal United States court cases like Dodge vs. Ford (1919), relies on the fundamental idea that there is a time value to money – in essence, that investors should expect future returns commensurate with the risk they take in the present when offering resources to a venture. This method for building new businesses was extremely successful at producing extraordinary financial returns for investors given its singular focus, yet often also created social and environmental costs not captured on the firm’s balance sheet.
Two people walking through a field landscape near power lines. Photo credit: Brett Sayles via Prexels.com (No attribution required).
"As time has progressed, previous bridges from the past to our present have revealed cracks in their construction."
In well-publicised recent cases, house-sharing apps have led to buy-to-let gentrification and displacement in cities like Barcelona and Lisbon, while social media platforms designed to connect people have also been used for the organised dissemination of disinformation. While their blueprints, tools, and building materials can still offer useful suggestions for how to navigate the difficult logistics of building a competitive start-up, the growing mass of climate technology entrepreneurs also bring with them an awareness of the systemic nature of the challenges they address. As I witnessed in Jesse’s case, these founders’ personal and professional experiences have informed how they use their core values to shape their ventures’ processes, drawing on the organisational strengths and structures of business in inventive ways to construct novel types of bridges between our present and a cleaner, safer, and healthier imagined future. By taking increased responsibility for both the positive and negative externalities their businesses create, they push back against a taken-for-granted predominant focus on maximising financial value. Instead, these entrepreneurs seek to craft new business standards mutually supporting social, economic, and environmental value creation, and are willing to forgo value mis-aligned developmental wins to do so.
Semi-abstract, hand reaching for moss ball. Photo credit: fajri nugroho via Pexels.com (No attribution required).
Typical of these ventures’ founders and team members is a communal desire to “do well by doing good,” referring to the process of building and iteratively improving on successful, financially self-sustaining businesses creating circular supply chains, manufacturing low-carbon batteries at scale, or providing other essential goods and services needed to mitigate the worst effects of climate change while crafting their desired future.
"In aligning ambitious impact goals with personally held yet common core values centring business responsibility, transparency, and accountability, the climate technology founders I research have created a business community challenging prior ideas in Management of how entrepreneurs behave, and for what ends."
Their presence suggests that the emergence of this type of climate technology venture is not only part of a social movement, but also an argument for increasing nuance in how Management scholars understand the identities, motivations, and actions of those engaging in this burgeoning space. Previous research broadly categorised entrepreneurs like Jesse, whose varied concerns deviated from past standards of how successful business “should” be done, as either non-profit founders or as social entrepreneurs. Yet, entrepreneurs like her do not quite fit either: while their emphasis is still on building globally competitive businesses, they seek to embed societally responsible leadership at these organisations’ very core.
The views expressed in this piece are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the Editorial Board, the Scholars’ Council, the Gates Cambridge Trust or the University of Cambridge.
Name has been anonymised.
Source: Venkataraman, S. (2019), "The Distinctive Domain of Entrepreneurship Research", Katz, J.A. and Corbet, A.C. (Ed.) Seminal Ideas for the Next Twenty-Five Years of Advances (Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth, Vol. 21), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 5-20. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1074-754020190000021009
Source: Guess, A. M., & Lyons, B. A. (2020). Misinformation, disinformation, and online propaganda. Social media and democracy: The state of the field, prospects for reform, 10-33. Link: https://www.opolisci.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf-front/Social_Media_and_Democracy.pdf#page=30
Ariel (Ari) de Fauconberg ['20] is a PhD candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School researching strategic challenges for entrepreneurs, incumbents, and investors pursuing clean energy-related innovations.
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