4.2 Innovative technological solutions

To begin writing this paragraph, it’s essential to remind what both our current state and our desired future look like. All this regarding the subsystem of sustainable entrepreneurship and the main actors that play in it. The innovative technological solution that follows is just one of multiple possible scenario’s, which in our opinion enables a sustainable transition both system wise and in daily life.

In the current state, we can see that Texel is already sustaining more rapidly, comparing to the mainland for example. This can be explained by the slight individuality of Texel as an island and maybe also because with its physical borders, Texel is the ultimate ‘playground’ for social initiatives as it represents a realistic fraction of society. We can still see however, that main initiatives and sustainable aims come from a higher power, such as municipality, national government and even up to EU regulations and decisions coming from the climate conference for example. Combined with the geographic location of Texel with the availability of sustainable sources, Texel is already a very interesting sustainable aimed island in this current state.

We do however want to look at the actors within this system, as we have the impression that a sustainable transition lays in the organisation of these actors and the relations they have. We see for example that in the current system, organisations as Urgenda are now participating as blacksmiths within our system. And these organisations, regardless of their highly valued work, share the ambition that it would be best if they would be unnecessary in a future scenario. That creates room for a transition in our opinion.

The future state that should answer to this wish would obviously have to be organised differently. But how? We believe that the key component in this lay in terms of sustainable focussed media attention, internet platforms bringing sustainable mindsets together and the collaborative financing that goes with it. This eventually should lead to a self-sufficient system with easier access to finance for small scale, green projects which are independent from private investments. We believe that in this near future, nature is literally telling us we should think about our lifestyles and how to sustain them in order to maintain on this planet. Luckily, due to modern technologies and the expected digital passports each and every one of us will soon be having, the knowledge exchange and the collaboration of similar minded people will be a booming business. History has already shown that people generally don’t react until something bad has happened to initiate this reaction, which in this case is climate change with it’s direct affection on human life.

This booming awareness, knowledge sharing and most importantly, a streamlined network in which this can all take place, should trigger each individual to become active instead of reactive. In particular on Texel, where we think individualization is in people’s blood, we can see severe changes in mindset’s happening. And this is what we think can steer this transition in sustainable entrepreneurship. The people of Texel and its tourists, will change from being a reactive consumer towards being a proactive demander. This new generation of people doesn’t just agree with a sustainable sticker on local fruit, but they demand sustainable products from enterprises with sustainable business plans and behaviour. Therefore, we believe instances will arise which will function as controlling actors to secure this sustainable labels on companies and products and which can change the meaning of the word sustainability from being fashion to being meaningful and essential.

We believe that with this sustainable awareness, high technological network and therefore the sustainable demand that rises, modern crowdfunding can be the funding behind this transition. Crowdfunding is something that was already used by the Texelaars in 1907 by commonly financing the ferry which sails between Texel and the mainland. It has therefore shown that it has worked in the past, it has also shown that it successfully exists nowadays and we believe that the essence of it will hold the key to our desired transition as well. In combination with modern technologies and future development of that, the world becomes smaller and for sustainable development, we believe this can work as a catalyser. Modern crowdfunding will hold many sustainable minded stakeholders which can secure the credibility of desired companies, which are provided by our highly desired sustainable entrepreneurs.