To address the global challenges of the 21st century, the United Nations released in 2015 the Agenda 2030, defining 17 sustainable development goals. Although businesses have a crucial role to play, it is widely acknowledged that continuing with traditional business practices will not suffice in achieving these goals. The for-profit sector is pushing the planet closer to environmental catastrophe. In response, sustainable entrepreneurship, which seeks to address market failures by pursuing social and environmental objectives beyond mere profit maximisation, emerges as a potential solution. In particular, technological innovation and tech startups are widely seen as an answer for most issues. However, their efforts can be seen as a form of solutionism and temporary ‘’fixes’’, even leading to practices that directly contradict sustainability. To date, the role of entrepreneurship within our society has mainly focused on solutionism. Because global issues, such as climate change, diversity loss, poverty and hunger are embedded in complex ecological, economic, and social processes and thus systemic in nature, shifting from isolated entrepreneurial solutions to comprehensive, integrated approaches is needed. This requires a radical shift toward a systems-thinking mindset, which is seeing things holistically and interconnected by understanding the 7 features of systems; interdependency, level-multiplicity, dynamism, path dependency, self-organization, non-linearity and complex causality.
Additional thought (added on 31 dec 2025): At its core, entrepreneurship, sustainable or not, already seems to conflict with principles of natural society. It attempts to solve systemic problems from within the structures that created them. Instead of adding, there should be focus on what is, the few initiatives intrinsically driven that come as close as possible to a natural way of living.
Learn more about systems thinking