Collaborative Entrepreneurship for Sustainability: Creating Solutions in Light of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainable entrepreneurship is seen as a promising approach aiming to solve complex social, environmental, and economic problems with innovative solutions. Whilst the concept of collaboration provides an important conceptual overlap between the entrepreneurship and sustainability literatures, it has so far received little attention in sustainable entrepreneurship research. The purpose of this article is to explore links between collaborative entrepreneurship and sustainable development. Sustainability challenges increase the importance for entrepreneurial collaboration in three ways: first, for cross-actor participation within entrepreneurial processes; second, for coordinating across sustainability issues and between entrepreneurial solutions; and third, for cross-sector cooperation between different forms of entrepreneurship such as social entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship, and policy entrepreneurship. We show how understanding this link between collaborative entrepreneurship and sustainable development sheds new light on both entrepreneurship theory and practice as well as sustainability research.