20: New and alternative forms of entrepreneurship and innovation as catalysts of “better worlds” (Michel Ehrenhard, Barbara Kump, Svenja Damberg, Max Goethner)
To tackle today’s grand challenges, policies at national and international levels increasingly demand new and alternative forms of entrepreneurship and innovation, thereby treating businesses as agents of a “better world”. New economic paradigms such as the circular economy, inclusive entrepreneurship, and regenerative capitalism – to name a few – are increasingly seen as remedies for today's most pressing problems related to environmental sustainability and social justice. Traditionally, academic research and education on entrepreneurship and innovation have focused on bringing (science-based) inventions to the market. Yet, nowadays, open innovation, field labs, social media, and citizen initiatives also play an important role in the uptake of innovations. Moreover, we see both more integration due to the rise of (digital) platform ecosystems and more disintegration due to a declining trust in science among certain groups – especially those that are hurt the most by climate change mitigation, new technologies, and globalisation. Additionally, the values driving entrepreneurship and innovation for circularity are not necessarily commensurable with values driving entrepreneurship and innovation for equity or inclusiveness. In this track, we seek answers to the question of whether and how new and alternative forms of entrepreneurship can be catalysts of better worlds. Examples of topics of interest in this track are:
• How can ‘utopias’ be used to guide the realisation of new and alternative forms of entrepreneurship and innovation?
• Which values should drive new and alternative forms of entrepreneurship and innovation for “better worlds”?
• How might we stimulate business model innovation for “better worlds”? What do these business models look like?
• How can incumbent organisations incorporate new and alternative forms in their operations?
• What role can the cooperative organisational form play in creating “better worlds”? How can we, for example, best facilitate the development of new cooperatives, such as data cooperatives?
• Which, and how can, new and alternative forms help bridge and bond academia with groups characterised by low trust in science?
• How can we best shape (university) incubators for new and alternative forms of entrepreneurship education?
• What opportunities do new (social) media afford for new and alternative forms of entrepreneurship and innovation compared to more traditional media?
• What do answers to the previous questions imply for inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary, engaged and impact-driven university education? What skills and competencies need to be developed?
Accepted papers will be thematically clustered, and within each cluster, each participant will present the key points of another fellow participant’s paper. In this way, we hope to facilitate exchange and discussion. For each cluster, we will also attempt to uncover what constitutes a “better world” and its related values and how these better worlds relate to each other across clusters. Ideally, we end with an agenda for realising some of our own utopias.
Keywords: entrepreneurship and innovation, new and alternative organisational forms, business model innovation, systemic innovation, incubators