Stronger together or going it alone: A juxtaposition of entrepreneurial individuality and collaborative practice for sustainable development

Research on entrepreneurship in addressing grand sustainability challenges is scarce. It is a role that is notably assigned to social entrepreneurs (Muftugil-Yalcin and Mooijman 2024, Teasdale et al. 2023). A recent conceptualisation into activist entrepreneurship (Monteverde et al. 2025) identifies integration, collaboration and social movement building as key cornerstone to entrepreneurship for sustainable development; which in turn raises questions around identity in relation to activist-entrepreneur-mindset (Simms and Robinson 2009). Notably, Gras et al. (2020) purport that entrepreneurs possess a “reductive tendency” and “oversimplify” sustainability challenges and are thus not best suited as change agents. This negates the activist-entrepreneur-mindset. More common is the view that the gap between entrepreneurship and sustainable development may be narrowed through improved entrepreneurship education (Brook and Smith 2014, Grimm and Bock 2022, Krueger 2007, Morselli and Orzes 2023). Only few researchers give credence to the possibility of entrepreneurship in addressing sustainability grand challenges, such as Steidle et al. (2024) identifying entrepreneurial leadership as a conduit for post-Covid recovery or Townsend and Axelsson (2024) promoting the potential impact of entrepreneurial companies for positive climate change innovation. Most notably, Johnson and Schaltegger’s (2019) review of entrepreneurship for sustainable development recognises the transformative power of entrepreneurship in tackling society’s grand challenges and calls for more research in this field. Individual entrepreneurial agency and mindset intersect with, and are pertinent to, the macro and meso-perspectives of sustainable development. However, such levels are often viewed in isolation. Indeed, in the entrepreneurship and sustainable development literatures there are calls for more research into entrepreneurship for sustainable development as a multilevel phenomenon in order to effectively examine grand challenges (Johnson and Schaltegger, 2019). Our research responds to this call and scarcity of entrepreneurship studies that address sustainable grand challenges.