1.3 Future of entrepreneurship

Traditionally much attention was focused on the established corporations which, because of their corporate social responsibility, already often try to behave environmentally friendly and reduce their carbon footprint; often to increase their corporate social responsibility and thus increase the profit. However, such large organisations also lack flexibility and an often necessary culture to be able to develop innovative sustainable solutions. For this reason the future of sustainability is in the hands of passionate individuals eager to create new business models and innovative technologies (Pascual et al., 2011).

When it comes to entrepreneurism, we will always have to live with the fact that a brilliant new initiative can be redundant in no time due to potential better alternatives popping up elsewhere. What this shows is a high amount of uncertainty within this system. Entrepreneurs are therefore usually risk-takers with a very optimistic mind-set to change the current market equilibrium. Within this uncertainty, it is inevitable that you can’t predict what the near future will look like for these entrepreneurs, but it is possible to improve boundary conditions in which these high potential entrepreneurs get a fair shot on the market. Especially when it comes to sustainable entrepreneurship, it is simply mandatory to our society in the next 50 years to forge a better climate for these actors.

financing the sustainable entrepreneurship

From this need for a better climate, we could try to sketch an outline of how this system would work and evolve over the next 50 years. Research on future of entrepreneurship shows several important things. First of all, cost of starting a company don't seem to be a barrier anymore since “technology and economies of scale have made it possible to start a service, retail or software company for the most affordable of amounts” (Nazar, 2013). For sustainable entrepreneurship however, there seems to be a very important difference since new sustainable entrepreneurship is considered to be more costly as opposed to competition that does not adapt sustainable actions. As a result, such initiatives might need a form of subsidy to be able to compete with unsustainable variants. Pacheco, Dean and Payne (2010) refer to this as the “Green Prison”.

However in a distant future (let's say 50 years) we envision entrepreneurs and the whole system to be disconnected from subsidies or any other form of top-down governmental financial support. The reason is very simple - the boundaries of our country's (landscapes if you wish) changed very radically in the past 100 years. Although the European regulations are currently affecting us very strongly, there is no certainty that an entity such as the European Union will even exist in 50 years. Therefore as the landscape environment may change critically, affecting the regimes and niches enormously, the best case scenario is being independent of such changes.

Being local means being stable and thus sustainable. New ways of financing  (e.g. crowdfunding) thus should come in hand and will be discussed in the following chapters of the report. Presently, we already see some initiatives and communities aiming for decentralization, for example through being independent of connecting to the electricity grid. Take the village Feldheim in Germany as an example; they’re not only fully self sufficient when it comes to producing sustainable energy using wind and biomass, they also created a local grid to distribute the energy within the community and become fully independent from the national grid. When overproducing, they can even sell energy to surrounding communities (Kennisplatform Energie+, 2015). We believe that more and more initiatives such as those one will emerge, because customers will become more distrustful towards governments and large corporations. The recent economic crisis has damaged the reputation of these actors. And this trend will hereinafter affect the entrepreneurs as well.

When we project this on Texel, we believe the island holds great potential for becoming more independent and decentralized. The pride of the inhabitants and their preference of working with islanders rather than “foreigners” confirms this and the physical boundaries of an island strengthen the need for more independent matters. Crowdfunding can be an interesting way of finance within that, since it can be formed by many local stakeholders as was done by founding the ferry service to and from the island. Crowdfunding can be seen as a way of decentralized financing with a large distribution of stakeholders.

knowledge sharing

Secondly, an entrepreneur's network is their key currency,”‘it will always be who you know that gives you the competitive advantage in business” (Nazar, 2013). This is something that goes hand in hand with gathering knowledge and the distribution and education. We believe that future sustainable entrepreneurs with similar goals should always aspire to share knowledge and try to aim for the greater good. Such knowledge-sharing and collaboration will help them reciprocally, because the innovation process may be speeded up as people will not be trying to come up with the same ideas as others but learn and build up on each other's ideas. Better boundary conditions for these entrepreneurs can stimulate this necessary aim.

Looking at Texel, we think that it is very possible to create a high transparency amongst entrepreneurs for mutual benefits. Such trend is already visible in the previously described platforms as TOP-Texel, JONT, etc. A unified vision and separation from the mainland could create a strong bond within Texel in which entrepreneurs won’t benefit from competing heavily amongst each other. Collaboration can put the entrepreneurs in a stronger position regarding the mainland and Europe.

youth and technology as important ingredients

As a third, youth has the advantage in the upcoming years. “When you first start working, your opportunity cost is the lowest and your upside potential is the highest it will ever be. We’ll continue to see a much larger percent of successful entrepreneurs in their early twenties and teens” (Nazar, 2013). This goes hand in hand with the fact that youth has the advantage of understanding the latest technological developments, which is key in sustainable development. Apart from this advantage, everybody now has the access to high-tech software and start-ups could arise from simply garages everywhere. “That access will lead to nothing short of an explosion in entrepreneurship” (Diamandis, 2016). This automatically means that it is gonna be harder to break through from the niches to the regime when we are looking at the previously mentioned multi-level perspective of sustainability transitions, simply because competition increases. This can also be guided by better sustainable aimed boundary conditions.

Finally, it can be expected that entrepreneurs will be engineers, since ”software will run our lives from here on out and therefore, individuals who can iteratively build software will increasingly become the model for entrepreneurs” (Nazar, 2013). This shows both huge potential and responsibility for this generation’s sustainable engineers and the way they will be guided on the market of sustainable entrepreneurship.

It seems that it will therefore be essential for Texel to be able to create opportunities for Texel’s youth to ensure a high percentage of young entrepreneurs returning to the island after their education on the mainland. Otherwise, there would be a huge risk of getting steps behind in development elsewhere. The good thing about Texel however, is the fact that islands are seen as small representations of society and therefore ideal for testing new technologies and ideas. On top of that, geographic characteristics of Texel hold enormous potential for sustainable energy production. It seems that all ingredients are there for these young sustainable entrepreneurs/engineers to lift Texel to great heights and a future landmark for sustainable living.

100% self sufficiency

100% self sufficient entrepreneurism means a stable entrepreneurial climate, supporting collaboration and creative ideas and speeding up innovation. Corporate social responsibility is an important aspect because it is the internal urge of the entrepreneurs to become sustainable. However, profit still plays an important role, thus also the customers need to be convinced about the advantages of sustainability; for that, trustful relations between customers and entrepreneurs should be established and kept. Through our design of transition process towards self sufficiency, we want to create local interdependency.

We believe that the desired enhancements in the boundary conditions should focus on how starting entrepreneurs can get up the S-curve, regarding the multi-level perspective of sustainability transitions. How can these conditions provide a spring-board for high potential sustainable entrepreneurships to get a fair chance to compete within the market to establish a new and more sustainable equilibrium. We think that at the beginning the impulses should come from the landscape level to provide fair competition within the regime. The sharing, distributing and education of knowledge in sustainable development is essential for absolutely necessary implementations in sustainable entrepreneurship in the next 50 years. These ideas will be however discussed more in the next chapters.