Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship: Bridging Social Consciousness and Sustainability 303124883X, 9783031248832

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
1 Architecting Cleaner Entrepreneurship
Introduction
Core Arguments on Cleaner Entrepreneurship
Review of Contemporary Literature and Gaps
Entrepreneurial Mindset
The Blueprint
References
2 Sustainable Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurial Domains
Entrepreneurship in Socio-Economic Sectors
Innovation, Technology, and Social Sustainability
Knowledge-Intensive Enterprises, Public Policy, and Social Governance
Case Studies
Entrepreneurial Public Policies in India
Agribusiness Entrepreneurship in Africa
References
3 Global Perspectives
Global Entrepreneurship
Alternative Entrepreneurial Strategies
Global–Local Entrepreneurial Fusion
Case Studies
Tata Swach Water Purifier
General Electric (GE) Company and Entrepreneurship in India
References
4 Designing at the Grassroots
Entrepreneurial Innovation Process
Innovation Process
Organizational Design
Building Entrepreneurship at Grassroots
Case Studies
AMUL: The Network Firm
References
5 Entrepreneurial Growth: Circular and Sectoral Perspectives
Circular Business Modeling
Environmental Mining
Enviropreneurial Entrepreneurship
Case Studies
Green Wood Social Products
Biomass Energy Entrepreneurship
References
6 Business Modelling
Core Arguments on Entrepreneurial Business
Entrepreneurial Business Model
Venture Management
References
7 The Road Ahead
Innovation Management
New Product Management
Entrepreneurial Challenges and Innovations
NEST and SUBADI Entrepreneurship Domains
Applied Innovative Solutions
Entrepreneurial Performance
References
Index

Citation preview

Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship Bridging Social Consciousness and Sustainability Ananya Rajagopal

Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies

Series Editor Rajagopal, EGADE Business School, Coyoacan, Mexico, Estado de México, Mexico

This series explores the role of entrepreneurship in managing social challenges comprising poverty, gender inequality, sustainability and climate change, income disparity, social healthcare, community housing and homelessness, and clean food and water supplies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Entrepreneurship in developing countries has an economic motivation and it is taken up as a survival occupation. The books in this series discuss various attributes of social enterprises, innovation, technology, and the role of leadership in meeting the recurring social challenges. The discussion on entrepreneurship in this book series is central to social entrepreneurship, family enterprises, entrepreneurial business models, disruptive innovation, consumer behavior, marketingmix, branding, profit and performance, market expansion, new product development, operations and supply chain, manufacturing, and servitization. In addition, the volumes in this book series also address the PESTEL (political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal) perspectives that support socio-economic development.

Ananya Rajagopal

Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship Bridging Social Consciousness and Sustainability

Ananya Rajagopal Universidad Anáhuac México Mexico City, Mexico

ISSN 2731-6874 ISSN 2731-6882 (electronic) Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies ISBN 978-3-031-24883-2 ISBN 978-3-031-24884-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my beloved son Akhilesh

Preface

The debate on cleaner entrepreneurship is fostered by increasing global concerns to promote ecological sustainability in social, business, and industrial ecosystems. Many discourses at global and regional levels have advocated different ways to architect cleaner entrepreneurship with focus on green technologies, which contribute triadically to social, business, and industrial environments. Consequently, since the beginning of the twentyfirst century, multidisciplinary challenge-based research is growing continuously to provide practical implications of sustainable entrepreneurial innovative products. The cleaner entrepreneurship is founded on the concepts of environmental mining, ecological research, technology, and entrepreneurship. Accordingly, the cleaner production has been adapted to the changing preferences of consumers in upstream and big middle market segments. The social consciousness and public policies have significantly supported the cleaner entrepreneurship, which has established market for cleaner products and services by educating customers. Over the years, the green business models have spread across various sectors and are seen as an important force with the potential to shift the consumer behavior and bring a groundbreaking change in the society. Therefore, cleaner production has been conceived as the sixth wave of innovation that induce green consumer behavior. The preceding five waves comprising hydropower, steam-power, electrification, mass production, and information and communication technology have been embedded in industrial revolution from Industry 2.0 to Industry 4.0.

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PREFACE

Considerable degradation of ecology and environmental deterioration along with the recent technological advancements have given impetus to cleaner entrepreneurship. The promotion of green tech has played a significant role in the transition of economy in developing countries, which has given scope for establishing sustainability-oriented companies. Therefore, the sustainability concept broadly encompasses environmental, social, and economic domains by inculcating higher social consciousness and outreach to upstream and big middle consumer segments. Green entrepreneurship driven by green technologies has gained significant prominence in educating and increasing the social consciousness, consumer preferences, and marketability of green products and services. The cleaner entrepreneurial products and services range from sustainable water filters to renewable energy for household consumption respectively. Such entrepreneurial focus helps in meeting the social challenges across food, health, housing, energy, manufacturing, and retail industries. The knowledge-intensive attributes of cleaner entrepreneurship supported by low-cost innovation and technology have significantly driven the social consciousness and customer value. The cleaner entrepreneurship model is based on the creation of affordable new technologies, developing congruence among cleaner products and market opportunities, and creating perceived used value of cleaner products. This book is divided into seven chapters deliberating on the ways to architect cleaner entrepreneurship and develop sustainable entrepreneurial practices within the framework of global perspectives and design. The chapters also address designing cleaner entrepreneurship at the grassroots, circular and sectoral perspectives of entrepreneurial growth, and business modeling. The last chapter of the book addresses the prospects and challenges of cleaner entrepreneurship by analyzing the retrospect and best practices followed in the developing countries. This book discusses the framework of sustainable entrepreneurship suitable for for-profit and not-for-profit businesses in the context of sustainable development goals (SDGs). Sustainability in entrepreneurship fosters green innovations in social businesses and encourages co-designing and coevolution of sustainable business models. The process of systemic thinking is discussed in this book to enable socially sustainable business modeling. Discussion on green manufacturing and consumerism as an effective tool in implementing the business models linked with sustainability goals is central to this book. It advocates the concept of collective enterprises with emphasis on shared benefits in contrasts with the linear approach commonly used

PREFACE

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in conventional business. The book critically examines the contemporary green business models discussed in the previous studies and attempts to guide business leaders to create socially responsive sustainable businesses. In addition, how a sustainable business model could provide profit-oriented business with a commitment to corporate social responsibility and sustainability has also been discussed in this book. This book converges entrepreneurial theory and practice to illustrate the chronological reasoning of classical and modern entrepreneurial epistemologies in the context of changing scenarios of entrepreneurial operations. Accordingly, the book discusses key concepts and related theories in each chapter in order to make it easier for the readers to see the link with cleaner entrepreneurship practices. In view of the above attributes, this book serves as a consolidated think-tank on interrelated entrepreneurial perspectives at the grassroots with focus on change management, public policies, corporate social responsibility, organized marketplace, and sustainability in entrepreneurship. This book provides a balanced view of entrepreneurial dynamics within gender-based social frameworks and portrays the organizational design, operational efficiency, and entrepreneurial governance at the bottom of the industry. Therefore, this contribution adds value to the existing literature. It proactively motivates future research on organizational and operational design based on contemporary best practices, managerial reviews, public policy performances, and theoretical attributions. It also contributes towards the strategic management of sustainable enterprises in the context of the changing leadership taxonomy, employee engagement, and stakeholder accountability to achieve market competitiveness and organizational growth. This book helps to establish new research dimensions on convergence of entrepreneurial practices and dimensions of organizational development in emerging markets. This book also serves as a reference for the students of graduate management program studying in entrepreneurship stream, for learning the green entrepreneurial management patterns in emerging markets as suggested under sustainable development goals. Mexico City, Mexico November 2022

Ananya Rajagopal

Acknowledgments

I am thankful for the encouragement from Jorge Fabre Mendoza, Vicerector (Academic), and Alfredo Nava Govela, Dean of Business and Economics Division at Anahuac University, Mexico, to take up new research endeavors. I have been significantly educated by the comments and suggestions of various anonymous referees on my previous research works related to entrepreneurship, innovation, and marketing strategy which helped me in developing this contribution. I am eternally thankful and indebted to Dr. Rajagopal for guiding me in the writing process of this book and motivating me to always take an extra mile in all my efforts. I express my deep gratitude to Arati Rajagopal for the initial copy editing of the manuscript and always being my guiding star. I express my sincere thanks to Marcus Ballenger, Commissioning Editor, Scholarly Business, Palgrave Macmillan, for encouraging me to work on this research and accepting the proposal for publication.

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Contents

1

1

Architecting Cleaner Entrepreneurship

2

Sustainable Entrepreneurship

29

3

Global Perspectives

53

4

Designing at the Grassroots

75

5

Entrepreneurial Growth: Circular and Sectoral Perspectives

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6

Business Modelling

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7

The Road Ahead

145

Index

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About the Author

Ananya Rajagopal holds a Ph.D. in Administration with a focus on Entrepreneurship and Marketing Strategies from EGADE Business School, Tecnológico de Monterrey. She obtained her Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Alliant International University, San Diego, specializing in Strategic Management. She has obtained two Bachelor of Science degrees: B.S. Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Tecnológico de Monterrey and B.S. in International Business Administration from Alliant International University, San Diego. She has had ample experience in the financial industry in Mexico City since 2006. Ananya Rajagopal has published several papers in international journals of repute and contributed research works at international conferences and edited books. Ananya Rajagopal is the author of the three books comprising Managing Startup Enterprises in Emerging Markets: Leadership Dynamics and Marketing Strategies, Epistemological Attributions to Entrepreneurial Firms: Linking Organizational Design and Operational Efficiency, and Women Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets: Managing Performance within Ecosystems. She is a reviewer of several journals of international repute including Emerald Emerging Markets Case Studies, Journal of Transnational Management, and Journal of Strategy and Management. She is also a member advisory panel of Elsevier Insights.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ananya Rajagopal currently holds a position of Research Professor at Universidad Anáhuac Mexico. She has been conferred the membership of Level-I of National System of Researcher under the aegis of National Council of Science and Technology, Government of Mexico.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Domains of cleaner entrepreneurial production (Source Author) Sustainable entrepreneurship Convergence of innovation, technology, and social sustainability (Source Author) Agribusiness and sustainability word cloud (Source Author) Entrepreneurial transition from niche to global market ecosystem (Source Author) New wave entrepreneurial evolution (Source Author) Attributes of global–local entrepreneurial fusion process (Source Author) Attributes of entrepreneurship foundation (Source Author) Innovative product development process (Source Author) Environmental mining and entrepreneurial ecosystem (Source Author) Logical framework of entrepreneurial business (Source Author) Architecting entrepreneurial business model (Source Author) Managing innovation and new product development (Source Author) Entrepreneurial domains for logical growth framework (Source Author)

19 34 41 48 58 63 66 77 85 106 120 126 151 160

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CHAPTER 1

Architecting Cleaner Entrepreneurship

Introduction The global awareness on conscious consumption has increased the demand for environmentally friendly products across countries. Consequently, consumer preferences have shifted towards green products and eco-friendly markets. Entrepreneurs are cautious about developing green enterprises to cater to social needs and play a sustainable role in reshaping the social ecosystem. However, the concept of green entrepreneurship is in the infancy stage and is engrossed with economic and technological complexities (Gupta & Dharwal, 2022). Sustainability is a socio-political driver that governs the business philosophy to build green effects in manufacturing, marketing, supply chain, innovations, and technology management. Businesses embedded with sustainability concerns enhance customer engagement and customer value to support the corporate citizenship goals of a firm. Entrepreneurs in developing economies lean towards low-cost sustainability projects, despite facing restricted outreach to stakeholders. Sustainability has emerged as a megatrend for businesses in the twenty-first century. Companies plan transformative changes in the organization to create social values across the competitive marketplace. Most researchers have expressed that green entrepreneurship is a big part of the rise of a new industry. Creation of the green market brings about both economic growth and environmental improvement. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9_1

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Emerging companies design and implement sustainability programs as pragmatism, while large and long-standing companies implement sustainability programs out of idealism (Oliveira et al., 2021). These companies have consistently generated significant growth rates and profit margins with the sustainability programs irrespective of their size and destination. The pursuit of sustainability, therefore, has emerged as a powerful path to grow business enterprises with social values (Liu & Hu, 2012).

Core Arguments on Cleaner Entrepreneurship The social and economic potential spanning demographic and entrepreneurial domains in the society have been identified as the bottom of the pyramid (Brugmann & Prahalad, 2007) of the development perspectives. This philosophy gained increasing importance in the social entrepreneurship and the inclusive innovation driven by women entrepreneurs who pioneered small-scale innovations within domestic economic field. The cleaner entrepreneurship has emerged as a sustainable innovation for utilitarian products, which enables economically deprived populations not only to participate as potential customers but also to serve as co-creators, suppliers, and producers. Therefore, cleaner entrepreneurship focused on developing sustainable products and inculcating social consciousness is considered as the key source of cleaner innovation and business growth. These entrepreneurs are active social agents, who gather weight in crowdsourced innovations, social capital formation, and deriving business models from social networks (Si et al., 2015). Cleaner entrepreneurship is evolving in emerging markets with the support of social organizations, public policies, and corporate efforts to achieve sustainable goals. However, such entrepreneurship entails high levels of risk and uncertainty, as they are often incongruent with social practices (Vasquez-Delsolar & Merino, 2021). Therefore, the success of cleaner entrepreneurship depends on building conscious efforts to connect social value chain system with entrepreneurial process to establish the goals of sustainable business. It requires enduring capabilities to develop new-generation entrepreneurship overcoming the social resistance. The sustainable initiative in local enterprises is not a common practice due to lower social consciousness and poor economic conditions of the enterprises (Strand, 2014). In addition, the shifts in internal and external ecosystems often make the initiatives on sustainable entrepreneurship complex. Consequently, to encourage cleaner

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entrepreneurship at the bottom of the pyramid, it is necessary to develop long-term objectives to guide entrepreneurs and develop an inclusive management structure to support sustainable activities and processes (Kelley, 2011). Sustainable entrepreneurial initiatives are often attributed to social consciousness, social persistence, and social values (3S factors), which tend to align entrepreneurial decisions, and empower entrepreneurs towards implementation of sustainable objectives. Cleaner entrepreneurship is observed in the society and social organizations through diffusion of knowledge, cognitive resonance of entrepreneurs, and support of public policies. The sustainable entrepreneurship requires economic protection against the uncertainty about the returns of investment and the cyclicality of social demand and preferences (Burgelman & Valikangas, 2005). Entrepreneurial ecosystem stimulates the value, economic benefits, and social resources developed through the unified efforts of entrepreneurs, customers, and stakeholders in a consortium model by integrating micro, small, and medium enterprises within a given industry (Spigel & Harrison, 2018). Such enterprises can be accommodated within the social and economic ecosystems, which are supported by the leaders and gatekeepers aiming at identifying incipient consumer demands, creating social value through direct communication opportunities, and shaping the market demand. The organizations within the entrepreneurial ecosystem demonstrate organizational design based on leader-centered approach (Roundy et al., 2018). Organizational culture, employee motivation, and employee engagement within the enterprise are significantly motivated by collective leadership as against the family leadership with conventional propositions. The business model on innovation and the role of leadership has profound impact on the growth and performance of the organization. Adequate and timely support from leaders leads to higher employee creativity and innovation, which then translates into efficiency, leading to organizational growth (Tung & Yu, 2016). The technology-led organizational design and collective leadership structure help entrepreneurs to understand the complexities and interdependence among manufacturing, marketing, and growth capabilities among entrepreneurial firms. The cognitive and motivational profiles (Koryak et al., 2015) of the leaders of these enterprises are oriented towards their decision-making process. Most micro, small, and medium enterprises rely on the knowledge and experience of other members of entrepreneurial guild across destinations and stakeholders within

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the crowd-based and social entrepreneurial ecosystem. Such cognition, knowledge, and reasoning help in implementing a collective decisionmaking process to establish crowd-based entrepreneurial models. Knowledge and experience of the leaders mainly influence the activities such as customer acquisition, new product development, market capabilities and competencies, and decision-making process (Hodgkinson & Healey, 2008). Hence entrepreneurial leaders tend to balance the relationship between identification of new opportunities and employee motivation to promote an organic and sustainable organizational growth (Rajagopal, 2021). The organizational growth of micro, small, and medium enterprises is stimulated by the implementation of product strategies, market strategies, and consumer-centric approaches. Most transformational leaders find it difficult to maintain synergy between financial risk, family risk, and entrepreneurial ego (Kuratko, 2007), as they are based on the foundations of family business firms, where the strategic decisions are taken by the leader. Such complexities hinder the decision-making process due to lack of intra-organizational communication and employee engagement practices. Therefore, the entrepreneurial mindset is based on both individualistic and collective decision-making processes. The entrepreneurial mindset has three unique components: purpose-oriented, people-oriented, and learning-oriented, which help in identifying the core characteristics of an entrepreneurial leader. Leaders with changing entrepreneurial mindset pose radical challenges in restructuring the attributes, identification of disruptive opportunities, market alertness, logical solutions, practical outlook, and risk appetite, which lead to firm’s growth (Subramaniam & Shankar, 2020). There has been an increasing global concern for environmental issues in the context of emerging entrepreneurial ventures such as start-ups and incubators in developing countries to drive their operations towards cleaner production processes within the sustainable development goals framework (Tang & Murphy, 2012). The major challenge in streamlining the innovative initiatives for the products and processes of these enterprises for sustainable development exploring the problems, needs, and solutions (PNS) factors affecting social and economic growth strategies. It has been observed and experimented by some progressive entrepreneurial organizations at the bottom of the pyramid entrepreneurial segments such as organic farming and vermicomposting. The renewable energy enterprises in rural areas in India, covering the residents of Dharnai

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village in Bihar state in India, have motivated the residents to switch from diesel-based generators to solar power. Such entrepreneurial experiments for sustainable development, understanding the PNS factors, require a flexible organizational structure and entrepreneurial ventures, which can quickly respond to social needs and converge with the market requirements to develop a win–win social entrepreneurial business model (Picken, 2017). Such entrepreneurial behavior develops strong reasoning against the conventional business models and entrepreneurial process as against the contemporary collaborative and open innovation approach, which has positive impacts on social, economic, and environmental sustainability (Cui, 2021). The business philosophy associated with social enterprises foster sustainable entrepreneurial ventures within the framework of triple bottom line comprising people’s engagement, social consciousness to protect the planet, and generate revenue by delineating the profit-with-purpose business philosophy (Rosenbloom et al., 2016). The transformational leadership can foster sustainable entrepreneurship to create stakeholder value at the bottom of the pyramid segment and establish operational connectivity with large companies within the industry to explore upstream markets. Therefore, it is a challenge for social institutions, government, and international entrepreneurship supporters to transform the paradigm of entrepreneurial production and process system from conventional wisdom to a technology-led sustainable manufacturing process. Accordingly, the local–global alliances can be explored to attract the corporate engagement with local enterprises to develop a collaborative production and operational processes. Accordingly, collaborative business organizations can share the resources with local counterparts to engage in dynamic production of sustainable goods and services (Chliova & Ringov, 2017). Indoctrinating the concept of sustainability in small and medium enterprises at the bottom of the pyramid requires transformational leadership to catalyze social objectives and link them with broad business perspectives. The sustainable enterprises need high investment and relatively slow returns as compared to manufacturing low-cost non-sustainable products. However, corporate alliances with sustainable enterprises at the grassroots support such initiatives and leverage entrepreneurial capabilities to attain the desired business goals. The development of green entrepreneurship in association with public–private partnership and government programs may lead to prolific business modeling (Ampratwum et al.,

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2022). The knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship linked with circular economy is breaking ties with traditional entrepreneurship and exploring entrepreneurial opportunities to contribute to sectoral, regional, and economic growth by adapting to green entrepreneurial models. Such enterprises are categorized as new learning organizations engaged in innovating social products within the green entrepreneurial ecosystems. Consequently, new ventures with a focus on green entrepreneurial process are increasingly growing across diverse sectors (Malerba & McKelvey, 2020). Corporations operating with the objective to develop business connectivity with local enterprises for effective implementation of sustainabilityled production and services engage micro, small, and medium enterprises in an umbrella paradigm. Developing such connectivity with local enterprises would help in increasing production, distribution, and consumption of green products by effectively managing the natural resources at the grassroots. Linking local enterprises with large companies encourage stakeholder participation and build social concern for sustainable development. The institutional and governmental initiatives stimulate entrepreneurial ventures such as the emerging start-up enterprises to engage in manufacturing and marketing of green products. However, the major challenge of sustainable entrepreneurial ventures is to create new market spaces to attract consumers towards innovative, responsible, and sustainable solutions at affordable prices with high perceived value (Fichter & Clausen, 2016). The developing countries have combined responsibilities of government, industry, and society to meet sustainable challenges in entrepreneurship and engage the emerging enterprises in manufacturing and marketing of cleaner products for both consumers and industrial use. In this mission, diffusion of knowledge and skills to encourage entrepreneurial ventures and to pursue cleaner production must be conceived as the social responsibility and governed through the reverse accountability of stakeholders. Such transformed entrepreneurial philosophy would support social equity, environmental protection, and economic viability to maintain ecological sustainability and drive social consciousness towards green consumption. Besides the economical and technological factors, knowledge and organizational design are also the major performance indicators to assess the current trend in entrepreneurship and derive future projections of growth of sustainable enterprises at micro, meso, and macro levels (Field & Look, 2018).

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The vertical growth of sustainable enterprises depends on their capabilities and competencies towards continuous innovation towards competitive products, while the horizontal growth is led by diversification of products and services within the sustainable ecosystem across geodemographic segments. The industry alliances and support from public policies towards resource acquisitions, knowledge and skill development, and exploring markets for green products help micro, small, and medium enterprises at the grassroots. With the support of industry and public policies, sustainable firms are able to make social impact through cocreation, collective intelligence, and transformational approaches, which helps in identifying PNS factors and process innovations within the limits of cost-time-risk (CTR) factors. In general, micro-businesses and social enterprises utilize resources available within the community as they practice entrepreneurial effectuation (McKelvie et al., 2022). However, industrial alliances with local firms help social enterprises to develop lowcost versions of innovations that can create a social impact using additional resources from the alliance firms within the industry. In this process, the technology transfer to local firms has implications on CTR factors, which often jeopardize the social impact and cost–benefit and profit in the long-run. Among other problems, which are largely obscure, local enterprises may discretely experience lack of infrastructure, depleting financial resources, sporadic absence of complimentary assets, and lack of required knowledge and skills to maintain the quality of innovation. The social impact of innovative products is largely determined by the degree of customer’s attraction towards adapting to innovative green products in the context of the competitive advantages (Stiglitz & Wallsten, 1999). Therefore, the major challenge faced by social institutions, government, and corporate sponsors in encouraging the micro-businesses with sustainability focus lies in managing the business vision and the needed efforts; and acquiring competencies in nurturing innovations, exploring opportunities, and delivering them with embedded servitization to the end users (Fernando et al., 2019). Green enterprises evolve with social collaborations to co-create social and commercial products and derive structural changes with focus on sustainability to address social problems, needs, and solutions. Accordingly, entrepreneurial innovations coevolve in the society and sustain through inclusive business models. Such enterprises are also supported by knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship, which tends to integrate the economic, financial, social, and environmental needs ensuring sustainable

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business development and growth (Gifford et al., 2021). The green enterprises evolve around four stages of entrepreneurial process comprising social motivation (self, family, and community), exploring opportunity (crowdsourcing and participatory entrepreneurial appraisal), acquiring resources (public policy, entrepreneurship promotion programs, and own capital), and market orientation (corporate alliances). These stages have several influential factors, which are catalytic to co-creation, collaborative workstations establishment, social environment, and community concerns. Green enterprises largely function within the social and cultural contexts that helps in exploring market-oriented opportunity (Murthy et al., 2021). However, these entrepreneurs face a wide gap between social needs, growth opportunities, and entrepreneurial barriers at the bottom of the pyramid. Initially, social entrepreneurs invest their own capital and, at later stages, pursue public funds through sustainable business model. The social organizations and government programs provide funding facilities to green enterprises in most developing countries (Bernardi et al., 2021). Sustainable micro-business in rural and semi-urban areas have shown bubble-and-burst tendency as these businesses were adequately supported by the government and social institutions, but failed to commercialize innovation and market products due to inappropriate business models (Corner, 2009). However, some enterprises, which could succeed in critically evaluating the PNS factors and override the tactical benefits, survived in market competition and could establish their brands. Such enterprises were backed robustly by marketing strategies like brand building, leadership drive, brand manifestation, and personification, besides celebrity endorsements. In India, the evolution of natural products company Patanjali, engaged in manufacturing sustainable fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), started as a micro-business and rose to the prominence of market leader in sustainable FMCG segment over time. This brand was supported by the yoga guru of national fame, which created a personified brand effect and social consciousness about the consumption of green products (Kumar et al., 2014). Public policies in developing economies significantly impact entrepreneurial activities with focus on green production and co-creation of sustainable entrepreneurial activities. The gender-specific support programs have also become the mainstream of entrepreneurial public policies that encourage setting-up the micro and small enterprises in rural areas and revival of farm and non-farm entrepreneurial activities (Mininni,

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2022). The public policies in developing economies largely support employment creation through sustainable enterprises and opening new markets. The intervention of public policies on entrepreneurial promotion in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has significantly boosted both social and business enterprises in rural areas (Acs et al., 2001). With the support of public policies, these ventures have witnessed alliance growth with multinational firms and investors (Habiby & Coyle, 2010). The public policies significantly affect the entrepreneurial growth and prosperity in the context of global markets, reverse innovation, talent management at the grassroots, and capital integration strategies. The public policies have encouraged a single window system in developing countries to provide integrated resource support (capital, raw material, technology, and entrepreneurial skills) to entrepreneurial ventures. Public policies in Southeast Asia have helped emerging enterprises in rural and semi-urban areas with a systematic blueprint of technology integration and encourage hybrid entrepreneurial operations. The entrepreneurial education and skill development also constitute the core of public policies to drive faster and simplified growth pattern (Schulz et al., 2016). Cleaner enterprises undertake more creative and constructive opportunities than conventional and linear entrepreneurial patterns. Such behavior has been confirmed through various studies explaining effectuation theory, which focuses on social ventures built within subsistence economy (Nahi, 2016). For example, EADS Astrium created Infoterra France SAS by integrating the sustainable agribusiness company FARMSTAR to manage natural risk management activities related to agribusiness. This company is an example of inclusive business, which describes the creation of uncontested market space through collaboration of stakeholders (farmers). The successful development of inclusive business of this company is observed in the development of innovative products that contribute to profit which is proportionally distributed within the community. FARMSTAR generates social benefits like sustainable agribusiness and farming based on low pollution standards by reducing the negative effect of externalities in intensive agriculture. The inclusivity in business encourages cost reduction and profit maximization through sustainable value innovations (Warr et al., 2010). Social environment and cultural context play a significant role in exploring and recognizing opportunities among green enterprises at the grassroots. However, self-perception and personal ambitions often raise self-conceived barriers towards entrepreneurial performance within social

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environment. The social status of green enterprises in various sociocultural environments affects entrepreneurial motivations and acquiring adequate resources to manage enterprises at initial stage, and scaling of business in the latter (Katre, 2018). Entrepreneurs managing sustainable enterprises experience social and economic constraints, and face challenges in innovation, and entrepreneurial and marketing skills. Technological education required for managing sustainable enterprises is relatively lower in small and medium enterprises as compared to the large companies operating in emerging markets. Consequently, the entrepreneurs are affected by low self-esteem, low social status, and low cultural sensitivity. Such problems affect the socio-economic ecosystem of green enterprises in developing economies (Goyal & Yadav, 2014). In addition, social networks and ties play a significant role in nurturing the sustainable entrepreneurship in emerging markets through experience sharing on social media and building a pool of collective intelligence. Small and medium enterprises focusing on green entrepreneurship largely depend on collective intelligence to pursue both ideas and ideals (successful entrepreneurs). Crowdsourcing has emerged as a significant tool for entrepreneurs to get ideas on manufacturing and marketing of sustainable products, develop strategic and operational advantages through green ventures, and build social wealth to support green business. One of the major challenges in managing green enterprises at the bottom of the pyramid market segment is to develop sustainable price– quality relationship, which leverages the core stakeholder advantages and attracts political groups and public policies to support these green ventures. Consequently, the green entrepreneurship focuses on the triple bottom line, which emphasizes the convergence of people, planet, and profit (Schneider, 2015). Accordingly, entrepreneurs managing sustainable enterprises are accountable for the PNS factors (problems, needs, and solutions) based on the voice of customers. The marketing philosophy of green products largely embeds the ACCA (Rajagopal, 2019) approach, which explains the synchronization of awareness (knowledge management), comprehension (social and business perspectives), conviction (stakeholder engagement and purchase intentions), and action (acceptance towards green products and inculcating consumption behavior). The socio-cultural constraints experienced by green entrepreneurs in this big emerging market include ambidextrous recognitions and adequate social support to carry out independent innovations and commercialization of entrepreneurial activities (Kirkley, 2016). These enterprises have

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gained capabilities to lead for social change in developing countries. The energy cooperatives in India have been successful in the niche business segment, as they adapt to the integrated social and economic measures to implement the entrepreneurial business model (Shirokova et al., 2016). Public policies in the developing countries tend to focus on improving the quality of sustainable enterprises with focus on poverty reduction, micro-enterprise credit, and the social norms that prescribe the conventional entrepreneurial opportunities for women (Fletschner & Carter, 2008). The public–private partnership and corporate social responsibility projects implemented by multinational companies like Nestlé (organic coffee farming, Colombia), Starbucks (coffee farming extension program, Mexico), and Cactus Power Mexico (Economic Empowerment, Mexico) also help green entrepreneurial business model with focus on co-creation and coevolution as guiding business designs (Selfa et al., 2022). The framework of sustainable entrepreneurship is suitable for for-profit and not-for-profit businesses in the context of sustainable development goals (SDGs). Sustainability in entrepreneurship fosters green innovations in social businesses and encourages co-designing and coevolution of sustainable business model. The process of systemic thinking enables socially sustainable business modeling. Discussion on green manufacturing and consumerism as an effective tool in implementing the business models linked with sustainability goals is central to the contemporary entrepreneurial philosophy. It advocates the concept of collective enterprises with emphasis on shared benefits in contrasts to the linear approach commonly used in conventional business. The contemporary green business models discussed in the previous studies attempts to guide business leaders to create socially responsive sustainable businesses. In addition, sustainable business model can provide profit-oriented business with a commitment to corporate social responsibility and sustainability (Diaz-Sarachaga & Ariza-Montes, 2022). Review of Contemporary Literature and Gaps The philosophy of sustainable entrepreneurship is founded on the concept of green economy supported by ecological development and social consciousness to attract increasing corporate engagement towards the creation of social value and green business, and improve the quality of social life (Brockhaus et al., 2017). The entrepreneurs with an awareness on entrepreneurial and ecological contributions to social issues constitute

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the core of sustainable entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial education (Faul, 2014) on sustainable social production and business is largely driven by inclusiveness in entrepreneurship, which helps in collective decision-making with a focus on sustainability to develop the ‘community commons’ (Virginia et al., 2014). The green production model has been encouraged by public policies and in the companies implementing corporate social responsibility projects with a focus on developing social enterprises through collective efforts. Such entrepreneurial drivers have a positive effect on regional economic growth and local business prospects, which not only provide economic leverage to the stakeholders but also improve the livelihood at the bottom of the pyramid and link entrepreneurship with business process. Consequently, sustainable entrepreneurship promotes regional opportunities and business growth (Gu & Wang, 2022). The thematic discussion presented above converges entrepreneurial theory and practice to illustrate the chronological reasoning of classical and modern entrepreneurial epistemologies in the context of changing scenario of entrepreneurial operations (Fuller et al., 2018). Accordingly, the key concepts and related theories endorse cleaner entrepreneurship practices. In view of the changing dynamics of local–global entrepreneurship, the role of green entrepreneurship significantly affects the schematic growth of entrepreneurial market. Such phenomenon calls for extensive thinking across spatial and temporal dimensions to restructure organizational development, change business practices, and manage disruptions in green enterprises. The existing literature on sustainable entrepreneurship in emerging markets categorically focuses on specific attributes like resource management, innovation, and marketability of entrepreneurial products (Cumming et al., 2022). Nonetheless, there is a paucity of management resources that exhibit the integrated perspectives of women entrepreneurs considering the longitudinal (over time) and latitudinal (across geodemographic segments). The sustainable entrepreneurship lacks in experimentation, entrepreneurial commitment, agility, and strategic alliances to reduce entrepreneurial uncertainties (Chandler et al., 2020). The concept of cleaner production among enterprises at the grassroots has been a global challenge, and it calls for a consolidated think-tank knowledge repository on interrelated entrepreneurial perspectives with a focus on change management, public policies, corporate social responsibility, organized marketplace, and sustainability in entrepreneurship (Ma et al., 2022).

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The success of sustainable entrepreneurship depends on collective production activities and offering solutions to social problems by developing frugal innovations (business modeling) and reverse accountability (organizational design). Such entrepreneurial activities are based on the theory of competitive entrepreneurship, which has not been discussed much in the existing literature. The green enterprises have a high selfemployment rate in developing countries, which restricts their business expansion and propagation of entrepreneurial values in the business-tobusiness segment. Consequently, the corporate alliances with sustainable enterprises at the grassroots are confined to urban and suburban level entrepreneurship (Gu & Qian, 2019). It is unclear how sustainable enterprises transform their business model through changing entrepreneurial perspectives and dynamic capabilities. Green entrepreneurship is primarily associated with economic development, which builds positive relationship through innovation, technology, and factors of production. These enterprises evolve with social and economic objectives within the concept of triple bottom line comprising the convergence of people (inclusivity), planet (sustainability), and profit (collective business models). Consequently, green entrepreneurs face a major challenge in linking economy and business with sociological perspectives at the bottom of the pyramid (Dong, 2019; Muñoz & Cohen, 2017). Upon critically examining the theory of disruption and the theory of competitive entrepreneurship, the discussions illustrate the role of sustainable entrepreneurship and its socio-economic contributions over the classical entrepreneurial values. As stated earlier, most sustainable enterprises at the bottom of the pyramid evolve from family business models within the socio-economic environment. It is necessary to critically examine the motivations for entrepreneurship in relation to the social cognitive theory (Wang et al., 2019). In view of this theory, the contemporary entrepreneurial and business factors influence green enterprises within their social and economic environments. Accordingly, business perspectives for these entrepreneurs are based on innovation, technology, and business alliances with large companies in developing abilities to face market competition and uncertainties in green businesses. In addition, the business model theory for sustainable enterprises has been integrated with hybrid perspectives such as 3D paradigm comprising digitization, disruption, and diversification to bridge the gap between conventional business models and hybrid sustainable entrepreneurial models (Han, 2019). Green entrepreneurship aims at increasing sustainable production

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and resource utilization through social and commercial innovations using low-cost technology and simultaneously contributing to circular economy by recycling of production. These enterprises also use recycled or renewable energy, which tends to reduce the production cost and promotes profit, sustainability, and economic growth. However, green enterprises at the bottom of the pyramid, supported through public policies or business partnerships, pursue high-quality entrepreneurial designs with cost-effective strategies of production and contribute to social consciousness. Sustainable enterprises face a major challenge in developing market competitiveness and creating consistent customer values to increase profitability. Consequently, in the long-run sustainable entrepreneurship affects innovation, technology, and research and development to promote consistent socio-economic growth (Gu & Wang, 2022; Lin & Wei, 2020).

Entrepreneurial Mindset The contemporary focus on entrepreneurship with changing social and business perspectives has significantly transformed the entrepreneurial mindset from family business orientation to competitive market ecosystem. The entrepreneurs today focus on stakeholder engagement, crowd-based knowledge, and collective intelligence to work with innovative concepts by thinking outside the box and claiming to understand the latent and incipient needs of the consumers. The entrepreneurs derive innovative ideas for competitive markets in an organized fashion by developing agile business models considering the changing preferences of stakeholders, customers, and supply chain players in the marketplace (Bentz & O’Brien, 2019). For example, ‘dark kitchen’ is one such concept where MSMEs focus on cost reduction by implementing spaceefficient kitchens and customer attention through delivery service only and avoid overcrowding of orders in the restaurants. ‘Dark kitchen’ aims at providing service to the already established chain restaurants by offering a standardized process of preparing their respective dishes without crippling the exiting business. Customers can place an online order in the restaurant of their choice; however, the order is taken up and processed by a separate installation to reduce congestion in the restaurant’s kitchen (Rajagopal, 2021). The concept of a ‘dark kitchen’ has been conceived as a revolutionary business evolution to align with the demand and supply for commercial workspaces with prefabricated design structures to provide

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added value to the stakeholders and customers. The ‘dark kitchen’ enterprises operate within the well-knitted infrastructure comprising parking spaces, shipping containers, etc. making it easy for the restaurants to offer products and services to remote locations (Wearn, 2019). The revolutionary concepts like ‘dark kitchen’ have significantly altered the conventional mindset of consumers who have transformed the focus of their entrepreneurial operations with growth-oriented strategy driven by agility, creativity, and innovation. The transformed mindsets have also raised the opportunity for disruptive innovations to attract customers over the existing products and services. However, such radical entrepreneurial attributes are often far from conventional practices, which focus on differential advantages and cater to asymmetrical consumer preferences by establishing unique sales proposition to support disruptive innovations. The new entrepreneurial mindset encourages entrepreneurs to develop innovative products and services on predetermined business canvas to facilitate the delivery of innovative products to end users effectively (Hakim et al., 2022). The current trends of micro-businesses engaged with micro, small, and medium enterprises, evolve around the PNS factors, which are co-created by engaging stakeholders, gatekeepers, and industry sponsors. Such innovations have low costs of production, which enable the entrepreneurs to deliver the products at competitive prices. The entrepreneurial mindset in the changing consumer preferences is driven by sustainability and social consciousness. Constructivism is one of the strongest capabilities of the entrepreneurial thought process. Constructivism focuses on motivations, curiosity, quick processing of information, creativity, risk appetite, teamwork, and practical approach towards innovation and technology (Zupan et al., 2018). Contemporary entrepreneurs explore their manufacturing and marketing operations within the predetermined entrepreneurial clusters, which help them in understanding the consumer behaviour and market preference and gaining insights from the entrepreneurial guild towards developing appropriate business models. These clusters serve as hubs for attracting potential investors, develop an entrepreneurial networking platform, and evaluate strengths and weaknesses (Winter & Knemeyer, 2013). The role of such entrepreneurial guilds is critical, as it provides a platform for micro, small, and medium enterprises to gain investors’ confidence and creates value from the network members, which stimulates venture capitalists, angel investors, and potential consumers (Wahyuningtyas, 2018).

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The changing entrepreneurial thought process is significantly influenced by global concerns on environment, which has converged the global and local practices for social and economic development. Therefore, the entrepreneurial outlook is largely driven by the social psychology and reasoned action for building a planned entrepreneurial behaviour. The contemporary entrepreneurial mindset is driven by social intentions and optimal utilization of natural resources to support sustainable entrepreneurship. Consequently, the entrepreneurs today try to establish congruence between the entrepreneurial innovations, marketing, and value creation perspectives with consumer preferences ambidextrously in upstream and downstream market (Hennigs et al., 2012). The social orientation of entrepreneurial mindset encourages collective innovativeness and pragmatic design thinking to nurture the new approaches towards competitive marketing and assuring customer satisfaction. The changing entrepreneurial mindset is also supported by the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behaviour. These theories help in identifying patterns for determining entrepreneurial strategic outlook. This pattern evaluates the capabilities, skills, and resources used by the entrepreneurs that seek novelty, originality, autonomy, and openness. Such traits are considered to be a part of self-enhancement (motivating oneself to improve existing market conditions) and selfactualization (experience through reflection). The continuous learning improves the entrepreneurial mindset and motivates entrepreneurs to stay proactive in competitive markets and engage in discovering opportunities, timely analysis, and opportunistic exploitation of ideas. The reference of best practices across the destination in international markets helps entrepreneurs to improve their decision-making abilities and measure the probability of success and failure of innovative products and services. Consequently, the entrepreneurial traits are critical to decision-making process including creativity, ease in solving problems, innovative ability, cost-risk-time evaluations, and implementation of acquired know-how. The changing social and market ecosystems drives entrepreneurs to grow as learning organizations by acquiring knowledge and skills to discover opportunities within the broad requirements of market. Accordingly, the idea generation and idea screening challenges must be meticulously managed by entrepreneurs to offer innovative products and services to the consumers in the context of PNS factors. Simultaneously, entrepreneurs need to identify the latent demand in the market

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and nurture their innovation to fill the gap to enjoy the near monopolistic benefits. In addition, setting strategic vision, mission, and goals would help entrepreneurial firms to improve their efficiency in managing exiting resources including capital and human resources, supply chain management, and relationship marketing to grow competitive. However, enhancing the managerial know-how is critical to entrepreneurial learning and practice. One of the major challenges faced by learning organizations is to transform their innovative experiments into a prolific business by measuring both the cost-time-risk and cost–benefit–profit ratios. Therefore, attaining a breakeven point at a critical time is a major challenge for their organic growth by generating enough profit to reinvest in the next entrepreneurial innovation cycle. The prolonged breakeven points for progressive entrepreneurs with radical innovations often pull their business to the niche market, which might cause low response to customer-centricity and market competitiveness. In addition, weak supply chain process and vendor management practices narrow down the scope of market expansion. The progressive entrepreneurs with continuous learning practices need to meticulously design the innovation concepts and map customer preferences to develop appropriate marketing approaches. Successful entrepreneurs develop suitable customer portfolios and design their product mix by choosing the three-dimensional perspective of the breadth of product portfolios, the length of product line, and the expected market share of each product within the product portfolio. Such a strategy ensures consistent growth of entrepreneurial firms. The value-added benefits of these firms would be to adapt to green innovation practices with focus on social and business sustainability. Such practices would help in maintaining core product portfolios, manage cashflow, and implement advanced elements of marketing mix to sustain the contemporary business trends. A strategic perspective of entrepreneurship with the above-discussed practices would help in achieving the business maturity over spatial and temporal dimensions. In this process, entrepreneurs must identify and eliminate insufficiencies in entrepreneurial process, which tend to reduce the market share and competitiveness. Such entrepreneurial vigilance would help in minimizing the loss, motivating the employee engagement, and stakeholder governance to reinforce customer-centric entrepreneurial activities. In addition, innovation, technology, and market-based product portfolio management helps the enterprises stay within the proximity of core markets with

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the scope of enhancing the customer outreach to both upstream and downstream markets. Entrepreneurs must ensure to acquire knowledge from the market environment and identify competitors’ approaches, to explore opportunities to ensure strategic business growth and maturity of firms. The ability of entrepreneurs to quickly identify the consumer needs and transform these needs into a business opportunity depends on the level of maturity of the entrepreneurial thought process. Such abilities of entrepreneurs to process information, develop actionable strategies, and implement strategic tools such as crowdfunding and crowdsourcing has a positive impact on the stages of the lifecycle of entrepreneurship. The cognitive attributes of entrepreneurial thought process decrease the process inefficiencies, and enhance the response of micro, small, and medium enterprises in the dynamic marketplace (Hajizadeh & Zali, 2016).

The Blueprint Sustainable entrepreneurship has emerged as a transformative business proposition to improve the socio-economic conditions of people at the bottom of the pyramid, and connect the social needs with innovative products and services. These enterprises intend to benefit economically and socially marginalized demographic segments by converging the financial, business, and quality of life perspectives. However, these enterprises lack in adequate technology and financial support from the corporate sector and government. The effective management of self-help groups with the support of stakeholders and government makes a substantial dent in managing sustainable enterprises like Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and Self-Employed Women’s Association of India. In addition, Rugmark, which has currently changed to GoodWeave International, empowered the corporate weavers in India to enhance their business to international markets to improve their quality of life. This organization has also raised awareness about children’s rights in the context of the industrial labor laws towards improving the social consciousness in manufacturing and marketing of designer carpets (Martin & Osberg, 2015). Social entrepreneurship combines the conventional wisdom of traditional entrepreneurship with focus on design-to-society and design-to-value perspectives. These enterprises offer stimulating ideas for many socially acceptable and sustainable business organizations and contribute to social

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responsibility and improvement of quality of life standards at the grassroots (Seelos & Mair, 2005). The perspectives of cleaner entrepreneurship can be mapped across seven domains within the thematic edges of the Foundation, The Green Model, and The New Window as exhibited in Fig. 1.1. The foundation of cleaner entrepreneurship emphasizes the role of sustainable development goals in social and entrepreneurial development at the bottom of the pyramid. Accordingly, the cleaner entrepreneurship includes entrepreneurial domains across social and economic sectors and management of innovation and technology. The inclusiveness in sustainable enterprises has been a prominent concern in the context of empowering the stakeholders and practicing reverse accountability in these enterprises. The sustainable entrepreneurship and social governance are interdependent as exhibited in Fig. 1.1. In addition, the attributes of knowledge-intensive enterprises contribute to the concept of social sustainability in developing cleaner entrepreneurship. The global perspective on sustainable enterprises conceptualizes systems thinking and its applications in managing sustainable enterprises by upholding the global concerns on triple bottom line (Lozano,

Fig. 1.1 Domains of cleaner entrepreneurial production (Source Author)

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2012). The 3S factors encompassing social consciousness, social persistence, and social value creation stimulate the growth in sustainable enterprises (Hahn et al., 2015). In addition, the effects of political and social ideologies on sustainable enterprises also support entrepreneurs towards innovation, marketing, and value creation in congruence to the global perspectives. Social leaders can help in designing green enterprises at the grassroots by engaging entrepreneurs and social leaders. Transformational leadership to support change management induces the designing of social enterprises by analyzing PNS factors, crowdsourcing, comprehensive ideation, and conceptualization of sustainable business themes. Contemporary perspectives on green entrepreneurship, with global and local focus in adapting to changing technology and business environment, are central to the circular entrepreneurship. This is conceptualized as exploring entrepreneurial activities within the sustainability domain and exploit business opportunities in competitive marketplace (Andersén et al., 2014). Sustainable entrepreneurial activities adhering to manufacturing and marketing of recyclable and eco-friendly products with internal locus of control, transformational leadership, and sociological perspectives of entrepreneurship. Sustainable entrepreneurship evolves around the domains of circular economy, value propositions, business transformation, and environmental mining to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, which help entrepreneurs in developing customer-centric business model. The stakeholder engagement guides the cleaner enterprises towards developing co-creation and coevolution of circular entrepreneurial models by examining the potential opportunities and threats. Establishing the link of circular entrepreneurship with sectoral entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial attributes and practices involves five major socio-economic sectors comprising agribusiness, energy, housing, social health, and non-farm enterprises including services. The sustainable agribusiness entrepreneurship contributes to poverty alleviation and economic well-being at the bottom of the pyramid. Such entrepreneurship is focused on employment and income generation to gain profit by reducing the incidence of poverty in developing economies. In addition, energy sector contextual to peoples’ participation and cooperatives focus on stimulating energy enterprises at the grassroots as social institution (D’Adamo et al., 2021). Such entrepreneurship has emerged in developing economies as a new organizational form which provides services to improve the social ecosystem by involving stakeholders in different

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ways (Huybrechts & Mertens, 2014). Social entrepreneurs offer innovative health services which are also supported by the public policies and corporate partnerships in developing economies. Entrepreneurs can develop cleaner business models for sustainable products by emphasizing infrastructure and manufacturing planning, supply chain management, and strategies on marketing mix. The business models envelop crowd-based business modeling, conscious consumerism, and role of green marketing networks in promoting sustainability. In addition, the concepts and applications of participatory and rapid entrepreneurial appraisals also help entrepreneurs in developing business models with triadic focus on design-to-market, designto-society, and design-to-value (Rajagopal, 2021). The future standpoint on green entrepreneurship encourages the management of firms with knowledge-intensive and hybrid reasoning. However, moving ahead with entrepreneurial philosophy to establish congruence with shifting marketing practices, changing political ideologies, community participations, and consortium enterprise practices at the bottom of the pyramid guides entrepreneurs in adapting to the entrepreneurial transitions. Therefore, it is necessary to foster global–local partnerships to encourage reverse innovation and collective business development projects as future endeavors on sustainable entrepreneurship at the bottom of the pyramid (Andonova, 2010). Entrepreneurial dynamics within environmental and social frameworks portrays the organizational design, operational efficiency, and entrepreneurial governance at the bottom of the industry. Therefore, this contribution adds value to the existing literature. It proactively motivates future research on organizational and operational design based on contemporary best practices, managerial reviews, public policy performances, and theoretical attributions (Hahn & Kühnen, 2013). It also contributes towards strategic management of sustainable enterprises in the context of the changing leadership taxonomy, employee engagement, and stakeholder accountability to achieve market competitiveness and organizational growth (Henninger et al., 2020). The rapidly changing enterprise-management system provides agility in organizational design, operational efficiency, and strategy development. The increasing opportunities of organizational design and shifts in the operational patterns have triggered chaos in the market, which needs to be meticulously handled in women-led enterprises within the span of their resources. The strategic implications of PESTEL factors

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(Political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal) on the management of these enterprises also make a significant contribution in founding architecting enterprises. The strategic decisions on improving organizational efficiencies comprising employee engagement, stakeholder value management, collective leadership, participatory organizational design, and team management add applied value to cleaner entrepreneurial perspectives.

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CHAPTER 2

Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Sustainable development has been a multifaceted challenge for policy makers to implement sustainability goals in developing economies through inclusive development models. Engaging stakeholders and community in developing sustainability across secondary economic sectors has faced increasing complexities due to weak links between stakeholders and sustainability programs governed through public policies (Bonnedahl et al., 2022). The integrated sustainable development has been planned across seventeen distinctive goals, which include poverty alleviation (SDG #1) by providing food for all to maintain good health (SDG #2) and well-being (SDG #3). The sustainable goals also focus on equality and quality in education (SDG #4), gender (SDG #5), by providing employment opportunities, and economic growth (SDG #8) through consistent development of industry and infrastructure to stimulate innovations (SDG #9). The sustainable development has also been focused to improve the ecosystems of cities and communities (SDG #11) through partnerships (SDG #17) to attain the sustainable goals by developing strong institutions for global peace and social justice (SDG #16). Besides, these sustainable challenges, the core concerns of sustainable development are focused on managing climate change (SDG #13), flora and fauna (SDG #15), and improving the marine ecosystems (SDG #14). However, the social focus of sustainable development encompasses by providing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9_2

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clean water and sanitation (SDG #6), affordable clean energy (SDG #7), encouraging conscious and responsible consumption, and green production management (SDG # 12). In addition, achieving sustainability is also aimed at reducing the social and economic inequalities (SDG #10). The green entrepreneurship has a stake in all sustainable development goals, which required transformational leadership and cocreation drive to achieve prolific performance on sustainability within the PESTEL (political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal) ecosystem.

Entrepreneurial Domains Entrepreneurial growth adapting to the sustainability and design-tomarket concepts is complex and a strategic development process. The small and medium enterprises have a six-stage framework to develop market competitiveness, social values through sustainability, and practicing effectively the stakeholder governance. These six stages include exploring business opportunities, determining success across stakeholder engagement in various entrepreneurial stages, developing strategies for competitiveness, survival, managing manufacturing to take-off stage, and efficient resource planning. However, each enterprise development stage depends upon the size of the firm, extent of diversity, and operational complexities, e.g., Churchill and Lewis (1983). While moving through the entrepreneurial stages, entrepreneurs face economic and operational risks, which pulls down their managerial abilities to innovate and stay competitive in the market. One of the major risks faced by most entrepreneurs is working with unknown or less proven business deals including sustainability and changing technology. Consequently, it is necessary for the entrepreneurs to carefully examine the risks embedded in the business deals by focusing on the returns on investment in developing new ventures. The sustainability-driven enterprises need to plan their investment over time through experiments to test the business assumptions, determine the project timeline, and refine the entrepreneurial objectives by eliminating redundancies in business and cognitive biasness (Gilbert & Eyring, 2010). Sustainability and social entrepreneurship are intertwined and supported by social innovations to meet the challenges at the grassroots. However, managing social entrepreneurship remains a pressing challenge, which requires attention towards a variety of causes and effects including

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the cost of resources, need for improving knowledge and skills towards innovation and technology, and a wide range of micro-factors affecting manufacturing and marketing activities (Bouzarovski, 2018). However, entrepreneurship intending to practice technology-based sustainability is driven by multiple actors including government, industry, social institutions, and public–private partnership. These actors support the emerging enterprises with hybrid approaches to develop convergence between conventional and hybrid organizational practices. Therefore, social enterprises with sustainability-led goals thrive to explore solutions to social challenges based on market logic and create social value. The social entrepreneurship is often associated with frugal innovations addressing social problems to meet the social needs through low-cost innovative solutions (Bauwens et al., 2020). The developing economies have exhibited potential contributions of social entrepreneurship catering to sustainable innovative solutions to meet the social challenges like eliminating poverty and increasing quality of life at the bottom of the pyramid. The convergence of social business and social innovation has been effective in developing economies and the global south, where a large number of vulnerable entrepreneurs have been benefitted with the intervention of both private and public sectors (Sovacool, 2014). In developing economies, entrepreneurs play a significant role in providing solutions to the social problems and stimulating local economy. However, the rate of failure of micro and small enterprises such as start-ups is high in developing countries due to the emerging economic challenges concerning uncertainties in prices and costs, lack of infrastructure, inadequate knowledge and skills to manage innovation and technology, and low market competitiveness. Besides the public policies, the entrepreneurial consortiums at local level should develop entrepreneurial policies determining the size of the firm explaining the optimum number of employees, encouraging stakeholder involvement, and developing the project charter and work breakdown structure to guide the systematic process of manufacturing and marketing for these enterprises. In addition, the management teams of large companies, philanthropic foundations, non-governmental organizations, and self-help groups can participate actively to support the entrepreneurial venture management during uncertain business situations. Such partnership would help entrepreneurs in holding better control over their costs, innovation, operations, and planned social impact (Thompson & MacMillan, 2010). Consequently,

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there is an increasing role of intermediary organizations in promoting social entrepreneurship and innovation. Social entrepreneurship with sustainability goals is critical to social innovation to tackle complex problems in the social sector including agriculture, health, housing, communication, and infrastructure. Despite limited resources for social ventures, intermediary organizations including government play increasingly important roles in assisting social entrepreneurs to build their capabilities and competencies (Tittel & Terzidis, 2020). These organizations are also engaged in diffusing bidirectional innovative ideas from global to niche markets (forward innovation); and encourage innovations which have the potential for commercialization from niche to global markets (reverse innovation). The social business ecosystems motivate sustainable innovations as accelerators and incubators to develop business competitiveness and profitability, and inculcate values associated with the social economy (Ho & Yoon, 2022). The recent advances in information and communication technology have opened various opportunities for entrepreneurs to nurture innovative ideas and participate in the sustainable social business to generate social and economic impact. The sustainable social businesses at the grassroots are driven by the public policies to facilitate the effective implementation of technology-led sustainability in enterprises, and to deliver social innovations within the macro- and micro-development ecosystems. The entrepreneurs engaged in delivering sustainable products for social development function beyond the traditional entrepreneurship practices. Such entrepreneurs develop design-to-market strategies in conjunction with design-to-value and deign-to-society-led (Rajagopal, 2021) business models, and internalize the partnership costs and benefits to grow with institutional innovation systems, which are critical to the social development (Peerally et al., 2019). In developing economies, the contributions of public–private partnerships and strategic alliances of micro and small enterprises with large companies have been recognized in stimulating innovation and filling the gap between the market demand and supply sources by leveraging the resource utilization for innovation and fulfilling the market demand. However, research studies focused on entrepreneurial accelerators and incubators in developing economies have addressed some social issues focusing on economic development and partnership roles, and reveal that micro and small enterprises engaged in sustainability-led manufacturing and service deliveries have faced multifaceted business challenges

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including financial resources and marketability of innovative products. The holistic view of micro and small enterprises engaged in developing sustainable products has often failed in exploring new opportunities and addressing appropriate strategies for social businesses within the conventional and transformational consumption ecosystems. Consequently, a few enterprises of developing economies like India and China have adapted to export-led industrialization trend to grow as a transitioning enterprise and foster a new market ecosystem that has higher awareness about sustainable products and their consumption (Jenson et al., 2020). Therefore, policy makers and companies intending to develop strategic alliances with micro and small enterprises for sustainable social development need to develop a comprehensive understanding to bridge the gap between social products and markets. Accordingly, these intermediaries should co-create opportunities to resolve the barriers of social entrepreneurs and social businesses. Such strategies would provide opportunities to coevolve and develop technological capabilities through collaborative investments. The Korean social entrepreneurships sector operates with a systematic alliance between micro enterprises and their partners, which provides a suitable setting to analyze the dynamics of market ecosystem and need to collaborative technological development (Westphal et al., 1985). The attributes of sustainable entrepreneurship are exhibited in Fig. 2.1. The ecosystem of sustainable entrepreneurship is driven by internal and external factors within five principal domains comprising evolutionary stages, sustainability drive, entrepreneurial partners, systems alignment, and risk factors, which enable entrepreneurs to manage sustainable entrepreneurship within the market and entrepreneurial ecosystems through the development touchpoints as exhibited in Fig. 2.1. Sustainable entrepreneurship has both vertical and horizontal growth with the objectives of social development through innovative social products. The vertical growth of sustainable entrepreneurship is observed longitudinally in a specific project and geodemographic segment over the period. The horizontal growth of sustainable entrepreneurship is geographically spread by covering various geodemographic segments through latitudinal expansion. The success of sustainable entrepreneurship in farm and nonfarm sectors is geographically expanded by replicating the experiments of innovative and social products. These factors help entrepreneurs working with sustainability projects in co-creating innovative products, reorienting entrepreneurial spirit, and developing decision-making capabilities driven

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Fig. 2.1 Sustainable entrepreneurship

by social constructs and longitudinal and latitudinal constructs (Gu & Wang, 2022). Sustainable entrepreneurship evolves through six stages comprising exploring business opportunities, stakeholder engagement, market competitiveness, survival of enterprise, managing take-off stage, and efficient resource planning. Accomplishing sustainable entrepreneurship is a major challenge at the entrepreneur’s end, but it can be driven by social and political leaders who help to create dynamism for developing new directions in entrepreneurial business. The value propositions associated with sustainable entrepreneurship are based on time and cost savings, social and environmental impact, consumption motivation, innovative products, and quality service. The use of information technology in developing proximity with customers through sustainability networks and social media serves as the principal premise of entrepreneurial business models. However, the key challenges in sustainable entrepreneurship are observed in terms of increasing costs, accuracy and impact measurement, resource utilization, and developing brand awareness. One of the underneath challenges in managing entrepreneurship is to achieve sustainability goals to engage stakeholders towards collaborating in the entrepreneurial process (Veleva, 2021).

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The sustainable entrepreneurship is driven by continuous innovations contextual to problems, needs, and solutions (PNS factors) of the society. Frugal and reverse innovations commonly constitute the core of sustainable innovations. Frugal innovations are low-cost, which are diffused within the niche to resolve the PNS factors, while reverse innovation is identified by the large companies that have the potential of large-scale commercialization. Such innovations are developed by sustainable enterprises within niche and experimented successfully. In addition, the cost of technology and its lifecycle also affect both frugal and reverse innovations. Consequently, the nature of PNS factors and their vulnerability at various geodemographic segments including bottom of the pyramid constitute the intensity of the social challenge. To manage sustainable entrepreneurship through the sustainability drivers, entrepreneurs at the local level need efficient entrepreneurial partners to stimulate their growth. Among many, the government and private companies significantly contribute to supporting sustainable entrepreneurship at the grassroots through public policies, corporate social responsibility, and public–private partnership. In addition, social institutions, non-governmental organizations, and selfhelp groups also contribute to sustainable entrepreneurship in developing economies. Sustainable entrepreneurship is also driven by the political consciousness and cooperation within the regional economic partners, who constitute an entrepreneurship consortium to support sustainable entrepreneurial activities. Consequently, new sustainable entrepreneurial ventures blended with knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship and sustainable entrepreneurship are increasingly active in developing economies, which contribute to entrepreneurial survival, growth, and economic development through sustainability measures (Bertello et al., 2022). Sustainable enterprises face a major challenge in selecting entrepreneurial partners and aligning entrepreneurial systems with the partners. The successful outcome of entrepreneurial systems alignment emerges in knowledge transfer management, co-creating innovation, and generating awareness among entrepreneurs and stakeholders to develop capabilities and competencies to achieve market competitiveness. These factors help the micro and small enterprises engaged in sustainabilityled products and services to coevolve with their partners and develop competitive business model. Such alignment of entrepreneurial systems with partners helps enterprises in streamlining the flow of resources, technology, and market requirements to create innovative business models. Such integrated business models help the firms identify new business

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projects and opportunities to deliver value propositions of their products to customers (Foss & Saebi, 2017). The uncertainty factors in sustainable entrepreneurship are largely identified as the management of financial and human resources, infrastructure, and the increasing cost of sustainability product due to the cost of technology and implementation risks. In addition, marketability of sustainability products and returns on investment in manufacturing and marketing also cause the principal reasons for lowering the efficiency of enterprises engaged in sustainability projects. However, sustainability-led enterprises have the potential to revolutionize social development and industrial growth through driving product transformation such as disruptive and adoptive product innovations (Soto, 2017).

Entrepreneurship in Socio-Economic Sectors Entrepreneurship in developing economies is fostered as a driver for sectoral development and social change. Broadly there are two entrepreneurial sectors consisting of farm and non-farm sector. The entrepreneurship in the farm sector includes agribusiness and allied activities such as apiculture, silviculture, pisciculture, and alike. The farm sector entrepreneurship is largely risk averse as most entrepreneurial activities are affected by non-controllable factors like natural resources and environmental effects. The non-farm sector entrepreneurship has emerged as the principal source of entrepreneurial income and employment. However, marketability of products in this sector often emerges as a major challenge due to non-branded products and frugal innovation products. In view of the above attributes of entrepreneurship in the developing economies, the entrepreneurial activities are focused on bottom of— the pyramid to explore solutions for poverty alleviation. Consequently, to foster entrepreneurship in developing economies, the government programs should support the development of infrastructure, developing capabilities and competencies in entrepreneurs, exploring opportunities, and finding new sources of output differentiation (uniqueness). These strategies should be supported by a well-designed economic model at the grassroots to leverage community resources and develop marketability of entrepreneurial products (Morris et al., 2020). Most enterprises in farm and non-farm sectors have emerged as startups with narrow projections of growth within the niche market. These enterprises involve conventional technology, which are not congruent

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with the leading-edge technologies to ensure the quality of lifestyle and survival of ventures amidst increasing market competition (Bruton et al., 2013). In the development of primary and secondary economic sectors, entrepreneurship has been identified as an alternate path for social and economic development. Therefore, local entrepreneurship is developed in an organized form as the start-up enterprises leading to generate successful impact typically in low-income geodemographic segments. Agribusiness enterprises in horticulture sector have demonstrated relatively higher income generation and greater concerns towards sustainable growth. These enterprises are also capable of generating social and economic values linking with local and regional communities which play important role in overall sectoral development. In addition to agribusiness enterprises, the dairy industries at the bottom of the pyramid also influence growth and income generation and uplifting environmental, social, and economic development (Charan & Murty, 2018). In an advanced ecological development, most micro and small enterprises engaged in agribusiness sector are able to build competitive advantage with green certifications enabling the cleaner production. The horticulture and dairy sectors have significantly adhered to the sustainability guidelines, and contributed to the local economy with frugal innovation and sustainability initiatives. These enterprises are primarily focused on the socio-economic perspective of farmers and consumers who constitute the core domain of regional development (Salnikova & Grunert, 2020). Micro and small enterprises in developing economies are encouraged as the economic driver to improve the revenues at local level and contribute to the GDP of the country. Therefore, these enterprises are clustered in a special economic zone, which provides capital- and infrastructure subsidy to encourage production and reorient the focus of these enterprises as export-oriented units (EOU). Export processing zones (Jenkins, 2006) are established in developing economies like India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Africa to support EOUs and impart continuously the knowledge and skills to manage innovation, technology, and global processes. The EOUs are developed in hubs to provide export proximities for products and services. These hubs facilitate exports to overcome social and institutional barriers. However, there is an increasing challenge in developing countries of decentralizing entrepreneurial support policies and providing autonomy to local administration to create agglomerated benefits across the rural enterprise hubs

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by facilitating community workspaces, multi-talent skills, shared equipment, and export-oriented production activities. Efficiency in transfer of technology, common physical infrastructure, and co-working spaces with common economic development goals help the entrepreneurial hubs to overcome the detriments of spatial proximities between production centers and markets (Merrell et al., 2022). In most developing economies, micro and small businesses are classified as rural industries, which suffer from geographical isolation driven by low physical proximities. Consequently, these firms are unable to develop congruence with growing technology and market requirements. The clustering and agglomeration of enterprises help in developing inter-firm networking and reducing the spillover effects of technology transfer and changing dynamics of innovation (Vorley & Rodgers, 2014). The decision-support system associated with entrepreneurial development advocates innovation hotspots in conjunction with physical infrastructure to improve businesses of rural enterprises and make them serve as feeder channels for large companies. Connecting these enterprises with mainstream industry can be explained as hub and spoke model, wherein the industry for specific sectors can be identified as hubs (demand centers), and micro and small enterprises (supply centers) act as spokes (Dubois et al., 2017). Physical proximities and economic development are closely associated and symbiotic. Consequently, connecting rural and semi-urban areas with urban markets need a systematic infrastructure planning to realize the benefits of interconnected agglomerations of hubs and spokes to accelerate production and business operations across small enterprises and industries. The urban experience highlights that design-to-market needs to be simulated across the activities in farm and non-farm sectors to integrate the economic benefits. However, the micro and small enterprises at regional scale are typically ignored due to unsystematic clustering, lack of market demand, and geographic limitations between the satellite and core business areas. Such disparities increase regional inequalities and spatial variations in adaptation of innovation and technology (Njos et al., 2017). Regional governments play a significant role in fostering opportunity entrepreneurship to improve the socio-economic conditions and quality of lifestyle in semi-urban and growth centers. The holistic view of entrepreneurial ecosystem exhibits that regional economy is based on secondary sectors (non-farm activities) to converge household income and market-based opportunities to improve the regional economy and

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quality of life. The public policies in developing economies play a significant supportive role and collaborate to develop such convergence to improve entrepreneurial ecosystem and strengthen self-sustaining opportunity for both farm and non-farm enterprises (Spigel & Harrison, 2018). The public policies are designed to boost the performance of infrastructure, public governance, and social services as the core functions to support entrepreneurs and reconstruct entrepreneurial institutions to induce systematic entrepreneurial growth through market-oriented entrepreneurial activities. However, implementation of such public policies needs political consciousness and support of social leaders, which can help in laying the foundation for a market-based entrepreneurial economy (Meyer & Peng, 2016).

Innovation, Technology, and Social Sustainability Developing economies are increasingly relying on integrating various social players to address the mounting social challenges through costeffective and utility-oriented products and services. Among many, the principal social actors are entrepreneurs who are engaged in developing social innovations with collaborative governance to address the PNS factors associated with various strata of society. Social networking, collective intelligence, and crowd-based resources encourage need-based collaborative assessment. Social enterprises work on shared resources, and exchange their skills, ideas, and knowledge to develop low-cost social innovations and build structure for collaborative governance to meet societal challenges. Consequently, the social innovations generated by the collaborative frameworks provide inclusive and diversified ways in manufacturing and marketing of socially sustainable products. Proactive enterprises address social needs through innovative approaches and engage the stakeholders to transform social relations and innovation benefits for integrated developments (McMullin, 2021). Frugal innovations are developed largely with utilitarian goals and address common societal and operational challenges by determining the problems at the grassroots. The stakeholder and consumer values are supported in the frugal innovation by balancing the production cost, price, and perceived values of the stakeholders. Therefore, in the initial stage, the innovative solutions at affordable prices serve as drivers of sustainable development for social challenges to grow the business at entrepreneurial scale and influence the

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business activities in the urban and semi-urban market ecosystem. Consequently, the frugal innovations aim at long-term sustainability and are able to nurture innovations at niche-scale business models with increasing adaptability to the associated technology (Agnihotri, 2015). Frugal innovations as entrepreneurial growth drivers have radically appeared over the past as an effective way to manage societal sustainability problems with the objective of profit-with-purpose business model. Frugal innovation is conceptually a starting point in the innovation process to address social PNS factors wherein the embedded frugality perspectives help firms both in business-to-consumers (B-to-C) and business-tobusiness (B-to-B) segments. Frugal innovations drive balance among the elements of attributes, affordability, and adaptability associated with social and economic products, which improves consumer resilience and rapid scalability of entrepreneurial business (Wierenga, 2020). However, frugal innovations have been largely criticized for low-end price–quality relationship and utility continuum of the innovative products. Despite the inconsistency in the social change due to reversal of household economic patterns, frugal innovations contribute to resolving societal sustainable challenges in a simple and affordable way. Accordingly, frugal innovations sustain with multi-dimensional perspectives to provide perceived value and connect with upstream B-to-B business segment (Zott & Amit, 2010). Innovation, technology, and social sustainability are interrelated, and their convergence depends on several factors comprising ecosystems of innovation and marketing, and the governance of contextual elements as illustrated in Fig. 2.2. The ecosystem of innovation has elements on various tiers, of which the social problems, community needs, and expected solutions are central to the innovation process. Linking innovation and technology with social sustainability requires collective or cooperative governance and accountability of stakeholders. Accordingly, the innovations within the community can be implemented, monitored, and evaluated to achieve the predetermined goals (Welsh et al., 2013). Social innovations are largely based on collective ideation and critical analysis of PNS factors (Jagtap & Larsson, 2019). The taxonomy of innovations commonly includes frugal-, reverse-, and ambidextrous innovations, which serve in the niche and broader markets. Most of these innovations are subjected to a systematic project planning developed through a comprehensive project charter and work breakdown structure to ensure predetermined delivery of innovative products. However, all

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Fig. 2.2 Convergence of innovation, technology, and social sustainability (Source Author)

innovations engross market uncertainty due to cost, time, and risk factors despite the initial pilot market tests and macro-marketing strategies. Therefore, entrepreneurial innovations within the community and niche are encouraged to develop industry alliance and public partnerships by establishing goals for commercialization of innovation and cross-segment marketing. Innovative entrepreneurs develop ideation through collective intelligence and social networking, which also helps them in developing approaches on cross-segment marketing. These enterprises largely depend on low-cost technology, which is either homegrown or intermediate technology supported by community or government technology hubs. Some entrepreneurs who could develop industry alliances successfully can use high value technology. The entrepreneurial technology development centers and technology hubs support the micro and small enterprises by developing the infrastructure and networks required for effective governance (Chrisman et al., 2018). In addition, the technology hubs are supported by the government agencies and public policies invest in imparting capabilities and competencies to the entrepreneurs. The principal objective to provide adequate knowledge and skills to the local entrepreneurs is to increase their abilities to

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use low-cost technologies with reasonably higher lifecycle for the products developed through these technologies. Therefore, manufacturing and marketing of frugal, technology-based, customer-centric, and innovative social products have shown higher affordability and adaptability within the niche market and targeted communities (Si et al., 2020). Developing the products to promote sustainability within society, and managing their long-term performance are often the major challenges for micro and small enterprises in developing countries. Successful enterprises start manufacturing and marketing of sustainable products and services in a systematic way by developing a concept map required for social sustainability based on local needs within the broad framework of global standards. Entrepreneurs also need to develop resource mapping and touchpoints for collective actions by engaging stakeholders. Such collective actions would help not only in marketing of sustainable products but also in equally distributing the social benefits among stakeholders and periodically assessing their well-being (Gallou, 2022). The entrepreneurial philosophy of managing innovation, technology, and sustainability includes the concepts of inclusivity and diversity to expand the outreach to employees and artisans. The inclusivity in entrepreneurial firms provides cross-cultural experience and develops innovative ideas in conceptualizing sustainable and commercial products (Gupta & Dharwaal, 2022). Inclusivity and diversity in enterprises support the triple bottom line comprising people, planet, and profit, which encourages stakeholders to participate in sustainability-led business activities to derive profit-with-purpose. The entrepreneurial philosophy to meet innovation and technology management for social sustainability needs to be congruent with the social agenda involving stakeholders and encouraging collective governance (Beliaeva et al., 2019). Such convergence helps in ensuring social and economic development of the region through sustainable entrepreneurial growth with rural–urban business proximity.

Knowledge-Intensive Enterprises, Public Policy, and Social Governance Sustainability-oriented, knowledge-intensive enterprises (KIE) are driven by collective intelligence and community relationships intending to foster a common culture through synergized cognitive rationale. The investment in KIEs encourages stakeholder governance with rationalization

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of business and operations models with sustainability and social objectives. These enterprises focus on low-cost innovative business models with integrated services and avoid duplicate facilities by optimizing human resources. Such focused and encapsulated enterprises promote frugal innovations and focus on delivering stakeholder value and societal wellbeing by engaging employees with positive emotions. The KIEs operate on three phase model comprising initial actions driven by community, entrepreneurial follow-ups, and developing congruence with changing market preferences to achieve the optimal integration path (Birkinshaw, 1999). The KIEs play a catalytic role in creating stakeholder value and supporting sustainable social development in a simpler and larger ecosystem exploring low-cost innovative opportunities across varied market ecosystems. The market ecosystem largely includes homogeneous and heterogeneous geodemographic segments which offer opportunities for macro and micro marketing models, respectively. The KIEs significantly rely on the resources obtained from the market ecosystem to coevolve with stakeholders within the social infrastructure. These enterprises facilitate and shape the entrepreneurial activities by converging market-oriented and technology-oriented growth paths. Such convergence of business philosophy supports entrepreneurs to transform their conventional practices from quantity- to quality-driven products and services to develop market competitiveness and consistency in business growth (Liu et al., 2022). Knowledge-intensive enterprises can be broadly defined as newgeneration innovative firms based on knowledge pool and co-created business activities with the aim to explore market opportunities for innovative products across the social and commercial sectors. These enterprises rely highly on the quality of knowledge capital such as use of technology, coping with technology change, market intelligence, and people-oriented business growth. Consequently, the KIEs are evolved with socio-economic phenomenon by developing innovative capabilities, value creation, and contributing to economic growth in a larger ecosystem (Malerba & Mckelvey, 2019). However, KIEs are unevenly distributed across geodemographic segments due to their distinctive characteristics of converging knowledge sources with stakeholders’ value creation. These enterprises are largely founded on the local socio-economic context; however, sharing of knowledge is designed through a wider network of stakeholders and enterprises. Therefore, the major challenges of KIEs

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are to extract global knowledge at the local level context and critically examine the determining factors for collective growth (Alvedalen & Boschma, 2017). The ecosystem perspective might provide a systematic understanding of theory and practice of KIEs, which provide homogeneous and heterogeneous networks within the niche and regional context to work with the key partners comprising suppliers, competitors, researchers, socio-political leaders, business partners, and stakeholders (Spigel & Harrison, 2018). Public policies in developing economies are largely focused on arranging financial resources, motivation and skill development, transfer of technology, infrastructure development, and developing market linkages to encourage entrepreneurships. The public institutions are encouraged to increasingly stimulate and support entrepreneurial innovations by bridging the gap across different levels of enterprises, and in developing market connectivity across small and large enterprises (Arora & Chong, 2018). However, the increasing need for digitalization requires the public policies to protect cyber-attacks on innovation and streamline the hybrid operations of micro and small enterprise to reduce the cost of physical operations and optimize the revenue stream. The major challenge in technology-driven enterprises in developing economies is towards providing a socially responsive public policy to support hybrid entrepreneurship within the socio-demographic ecosystems. Though hybrid entrepreneurship attracts larger number of firms at micro and small scale, the lack of appropriate public policy deters these firms to operate flawlessly in competitive business environment (Kaplan et al., 2011). Public policies in various entrepreneurial sectors require streamlining from the point of view of providing comparative advantages in obtaining financial resources in the context of institutional and market outlets. Emerging markets focus on developing public policies to support startups as an engine of economic growth and structural change, but at various incidences, the small and medium enterprises are deprived of certain financial and infrastructural benefits. Therefore, policy makers in developing economies must engage on evidence-based platforms by evaluating the scope of business and projected profit of enterprises across tiers. The high level of heterogeneity among micro and small enterprises makes it difficult for policy developers to develop synchronized policies with socioeconomic and market conditions. Consequently, most entrepreneurial public policies in developing economies operate under dual ecosystems (Kantis et al., 2020).

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Enterprises focusing on sustainable products and services are considered as social subjects rather than economic. Therefore, sociopolitical intervention in managing sustainability-oriented enterprises often becomes inevitable in the developing economies. Such enterprises are evolved within the social ecosystems and are built through social governance. The social and sustainability systems are continuously changing, which requires transformation in the governance pattern contextual to the potential change and complexities. Most enterprises with sustainability goals adapt to inclusivity- and diversity-policies developed within the society to generate a consistent impact within niche. The social governance generates reflexivity and political awareness through integration of social benefits for the growth of business and economy (Lange et al., 2013).

Case Studies Entrepreneurial Public Policies in India Public policies encouraging sustainable development through micro and small enterprises in India seek wide support from communities, self-help groups, and non-governmental organizations involving stakeholders with focus on circular economy and green energy. Public policies constantly upgrade the quality standards of the products and processes in all sectors of economy including agriculture, manufacturing, and services to contribute to sustainable development through collective objective. The technology upgrading and quality certifications are provided through A Scheme for Promoting Innovation, Rural Industry, and Entrepreneurship (ASPIRE). The sustainable entrepreneurship is carried out by semigovernment organizations notably Coir Board of India and Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC), which provide knowledge and skill development programs to entrepreneurs and coordinate with backward and forwards linkages required for the micro and small enterprises.1 Entrepreneurship in coir activities is institutionalized through the cooperative societies in coastal states in India including Kerala, Karnataka,

1 Government of India, Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises, A note on MSMEs are Engines of our economy to achieve sustainable development (https://msme. gov.in/msmes-are-engines-our-economy-achieve-sustainable-development, retrieved on 15 July 2022).

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Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh. Organizing the coir entrepreneurs’ cooperatives has been an effect of the withdrawal of foreign capitalists from the coir sector, and smoothened the inflow of local industrialists and middlemen into the coir processing and operations. The coir cooperatives offer a community workplace, which also serves as the design center to develop innovative coir products and support the sustainability norms of the society (Pandey & Pansera, 2020). The typology of the coir cooperatives includes entrepreneurs who collect dry coconuts and green husk from the coconut producers. These entrepreneurs are primarily engaged in producing yarn from the coir of various qualities for industrial use (Rammohan & Sundaresan, 2003). The fiber cooperative societies engage entrepreneurs in manufacturing sustainable coir products through the husk beating machines and market the products through coir federation for industrial use. The entrepreneurs of coir and mat manufacturing cooperative society produce customer-centric products like mats, matting, rugs, and carpets needed for households, institutions, and business firms. The coir board implements entrepreneurial public policies of the government to plan, promote, and facilitate the entrepreneurial activities. The Coir Geo-textiles (CGT) protect the land erosion from coconut plant cultivation and quick vegetation to provide sustainable raw material for the coir entrepreneurs. Similarly, the KVIC encourages entrepreneurs in manufacturing handspun and hand-woven fabrics to develop conscious consumerism and support sustainability in terms of economy (Bhalla et al., 2018). The heritage model of hand-spun and hand-woven textiles are produced in small clusters of artisans within the rural ecosystem. These artisanal clusters produce the products in a cooperative system and distribute them nationwide through public agencies. Such textile is eco-friendly and sustainable, which is chemical free, carbon neutral, and completely natural in both its ingredients and production process. Consequently, handspun and hand-woven textiles have achieved green certifications and are considered as high-value organic textiles. The entrepreneurs engaged in this textile trade are supported under various government programs and the KVIC funding schemes which ensure raw material, working capital, subsidy and capital, infrastructure, and marketing support.

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Agribusiness Entrepreneurship in Africa Agribusiness in Africa is considered as business in the context of social entrepreneurship, which is driven by community motivation and collective intelligence. The cooperatives in the region have emerged as the driver for social consciousness, and as an effective tool for agribusiness among rural communities. The agribusiness entrepreneurship is developed for social and economic development and designed in the context of developing rural–urban linkages to support local economy and social sustainability. Agribusiness in Africa, specifically in countries including South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal, has emerged as an employmentgenerating sector through continuous innovation and improvement in agribusiness processes. Community development programs in these countries encourage entrepreneurial development in this sector by providing community infrastructure, technology, and imparting business skills to the agribusiness entrepreneurs. Agribusiness and agro-industries in SubSaharan region of Africa contribute significantly to the national income of the region (more than 30%) by way of bulk exports of raw and processed agricultural products, which provide the principal revenue stream and employment to the agribusiness entrepreneurs (FAO, 2014). Investment in agro-industries has a multiplier effect by creating value chains and establishing backward and forward linkages to streamline the marketing of raw and processed agricultural products in the regional and international markets. Agribusiness entrepreneurs essentially support the rapidly growing urbanization within regions and supplement agro-food products to European countries. Consequently, the status of agribusiness entrepreneurs in Africa is challenging in the social and economic ecosystems for generating desired income to reduce poverty levels and creating continuous employment in this sector. Agribusiness entrepreneurs in subSaharan Africa generate value in terms of entrepreneurial profit, employment, providing cost-effective and nutritious agro-products to community, and generating taxable revenues that can contribute to improved services, infrastructure, and social norms (Viswanathan et al., 2014). In addition, agribusiness entrepreneurship drives positive economic, social, and environmental impacts, which can be defined as entrepreneurial externalities due to collective efforts. The selected indicators of agribusiness entrepreneurship combined with sustainability goals in sub-Saharan Africa are exhibited as a word cloud in Fig. 2.3

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Fig. 2.3 Agribusiness and sustainability word cloud (Source Author)

Agribusiness entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa are also able to use frugal and potential technologies associated with agricultural production, processing, packaging, and marketing. The example of franchising or Business-in-a-Box venture can be cited appropriately to explain the operational attributes of agribusiness entrepreneurs in this region, which provide networking platforms and community mentorship (Kuada, 2009). The community mentoring includes imparting knowledge and skills to agribusiness entrepreneurs to explore and upgrade opportunities, and develop incubating technologies and innovation hubs to widen the agribusiness entrepreneurial scale. Scaling up agribusiness entrepreneurship is spread across existing and new markets through market development, export commitments (scaling-up), and vertical penetration within the existing niche and regional markets (deep-scaling). The opportunities of agribusiness entrepreneurship are extended to new markets through diversification of processed agricultural products (scaling across) and

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exploring new markets for new products (scaling-out) with a focus on sustainability, value creation, and income generation (Lopes, 2014).

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CHAPTER 3

Global Perspectives

Cleaner entrepreneurship with a focus on sustainability is a subject of social consciousness and community efforts, which provide directions to entrepreneurial process in achieving a sustainable social impact. Systems thinking is an organized process of ideation, task performance, and developing convergence with the problems, needs, and solutions (PNS) factors in the context of divergent social perspectives. Systems thinking and social perspective are a streamlined outgrowth of collective intelligence and informal social appraisals (McCool, 2022). Collective intelligence has emerged as a social trigger to systems thinking, which enables transformation and thinking processes within the firm to match the inflow of communication through interconnected platforms and social dynamics to simplify the embedded complexities in entrepreneurship and sustainability (Morse, 2020). Systems thinking is an exercise essential to overcome the ineffective and counterproductive conventional stigmas addressing the social challenges within entrepreneurial domains and communities. The collective thinking and cognitive reasoning in a group behavior often lean towards implementing a quick leap in future development perspective by shifting the existing pattern of entrepreneurial culture. The abrupt shift in culture is jeopardized with the lack of returns on investment, cost escalations, and ineffective adaptability to the outcomes. Consequently,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9_3

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to assure a smooth transition in entrepreneurship and achieving longterm social values, systems thinking perspectives need to be introduced to understand the situations, develop people-centric goals, make profitoriented decisions, and achieve both short- and long-term outcomes. The short-term outcomes can be visualized within the social niche, while the long-term entrepreneurial efforts can be projected towards upstream markets. Systems thinking has also emerged as a tool for strategists and policy makers to understand the conditions that propagate sustainability through entrepreneurship to meet the challenges underneath society. Such transformation in social thinking is required to move away from anthropocentric thinking and address sustainability challenges through stakeholder participation and engagement. Such social dynamics develop creative semantics to interconnect the transformatory thought process with changing technologies, social practices, and business models leading to a paradigm shift in sustainability (Voulvoulis et al., 2022). To contribute to the social sustainability, local entrepreneurs need to develop organizational capacity to implement transitional entrepreneurial philosophy with a focus on contribution entrepreneurial projects to social development. Consequently, entrepreneurs need to explore creative potential in entrepreneurial practices while maintaining dynamic capabilities and social accountability in producing social and commercial products. Such transition in entrepreneurial systems thinking process requires institutional flexibility, transformational leadership, effective leader-member exchange, and alignment within the operational systems to facilitate the change needed to support social sustainability. Entrepreneurial systems are widely scattered and complex, which are difficult to integrate within a holistic system thinking. However, social interaction and self-organizing capabilities of entrepreneurs could help in integrating the divergent perspectives of entrepreneurship into a predefined and adaptable systems approach. Accordingly, systems thinking is able to integrate social and individual working systems while overreaching a mindset to develop consensus on the PNS factors. Therefore, it is necessary to develop open systems (transitional and contemporary) over the closed thinking systems (conventional entrepreneurial systems such as a family business) to promote sustainable enterprises. Such a pathway makes systems thinking to transcend from conventional cognition to collective reasoning and strike a balance between the people, planet, and profit leading to the triple bottom line (Judge, 2011). The low-wage,

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scattered software engineering entrepreneurs in India faced an increasing challenge to organize and developed a collective approach to market using systems thinking. However, due to entrepreneurial specializations and work culture with sponsors, most start-ups engaged in software engineering were unable to integrate into a broader system. A collective business model introduced by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) relies on low-wage software engineering talent to grow competitive and achieve success. A large pool of engineering graduates with amateur start-ups exploring financial resources and infrastructure were pooled by TCS to deliver the company’s commitments using a systems approach to design a training and development framework for the above engineering graduates to meet the business growth (Wee & Buche, 2008). The society-driven systems thinking approach helps entrepreneurs to restructure their mental models, and foster personal and shared vision to develop sustainability-linked business models and collaborate their entrepreneurial efforts through conceptual, relational, and action-driven learning ecology. In the early twenty-first century, corporations such as Shell, Harley Davidson, HP, Xerox, and Nike have developed systems thinking initiatives with a focus on developing collaborative solutions to meet sustainability challenges in the society. Though such initiative was taken by large companies, systems thinking can also be implemented within the entrepreneurial consortium at the bottom of the pyramid social segment (Senge et al., 2007). Systems thinking in social enterprises are encouraged to resolve complex socio-economic issues to create value to the stakeholders and to seek financial sustainability for the enterprise and augment sustainability benefits. The conventional approach to entrepreneurship, which focuses on centralized leadership and disengaging employees in social innovation often creates hindrances in adapting to collective systems thinking supported by design thinking leading to a human-centered framework for social innovation. Consequently, systems thinking and social entrepreneurship are symbiotic and are identified as the contributing factor to the development of crowdbased business models and provide social value to the communities while reducing the externality effects pushing the entrepreneurial business to niche (Mahato et al., 2021). Systems thinking in social enterprises helps in overcoming socio-economic and leadership barriers to resource mobilization and exploiting market opportunities by creating social value through collective decision-making, problem-solving, and innovative growth process. However, systems thinking in micro and small

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enterprises need to be supported with modified personality traits such as employee engagement, empathy, and decentralization in decision-making. These attributes help in driving social enterprises to expand the social benefits and overcome the human-centered constraints for innovation (Bacq & Alt, 2018).

Global Entrepreneurship Scaling-up social, micro, and small enterprises is a major challenge in the developing economies due to the resource limitations and their operational congruence with upstream markets. The link between entrepreneurial transitions and information and communication technologies is a crucial convergence factor, which is driven by the dynamics of entrepreneurial know-how, digital mediation, and technology-driven marketing practices. Social media platforms actively push digital communities to transform bottom-up entrepreneurial practices leading to digitalization for changing the local outlook and contribute to economy through entrepreneurial transition. The female entrepreneurs in the diaspora of developing economies are supported by the local and international organizations to develop compatibility with advancing information and communication technology and migrate the conventional operations of small-scale entrepreneurship to a boundaryless business environment. The association of micro and small enterprises with e-commerce platforms has shown a prolific impact on the changing practices over cross-border trade through digital platforms (Steel, 2021). Local enterprises have played a significant role as the feeder resource to provide raw materials and semi-finished products to large enterprises in urban areas by establishing strong backward linkages. Such entrepreneurial connectivity with upstream markets and industries has extended livelihood opportunities beyond the niche. Information and communication technologies and social media have further transformed and intensified economic transactions by incorporating the micro and small enterprises as feeder channels in global trade. The micro and small enterprises in China have expanded their global connectivity to serve extended markets through e-commerce companies like Alibaba and Amazon with customer-centric focus. Through an integrated online system of classified websites, most innovative start-ups in Asia including India and China have successfully used the e-commerce platforms to expand their markets and build their business across the networks within

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the diaspora of consumers in developing economies. Consequently, the transformation of conventional entrepreneurial practices and bottom-up marketing strategies have generated inflated socio-economic opportunities for urban consumers in developing countries including South-East Asian, African, and Latin American regions (Zoomers & Westen, 2011). The journey of micro and small enterprises towards global market has begun in mid-1980s after the concern for globalization penetrated down to smaller human habitats and entrepreneurial clusters. Marketing of entrepreneurial products such as handicrafts have adapted to the proximity approach across the neighborhoods and larger habitats like semi-urban and urban areas. The congestion of entrepreneurial markets has motivated entrepreneurs to search for new markets by understanding the psychosocial factors of consumers and industrial clients. The cultural background and shared experiences drive the gradual geographic transition of entrepreneurial products and services. Government organizations in developing countries have played a significant role in supporting such entrepreneurial migration from rural to urban diaspora by stimulating entrepreneurs to participate in open-air markets in urban areas. An example may be cited of Delhi Haat in India, which was organized by government and industry partners to provide a wider outlet for entrepreneurial products and have an interface with urban consumers and tourists (Manavvi & Rajasekar, 2021). Traditional handicrafts constitute the core of entrepreneurship in developing countries, which have gained significant attraction in global markets due to ecological ethos and harmonious coexistence between consumption and sustainability. The distinctive attributes of handicrafts and traditional entrepreneurship have been appreciated in global markets as a slow fashion within the sustainability and organic fashion trends. Accordingly, the conventional entrepreneurial journey has gained momentum, reason, and intentions to connect with semi-urban and urban consumer habitats. The niche entrepreneurship has developed a cultural identity and could successfully drive the self-image concept to support the conventional entrepreneurship within the umbrella of sustainable, organic, and fashion consumptions. This trend has evolved into two distinctive directions of global business: transforming conventional entrepreneurship with hybrid concepts and creating cross-cultural designs to bridge geographic breaches. The positive impact of information and communication technologies and digital interface between entrepreneurs and consumers have broadly focused on economic growth

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and building capabilities and competencies of entrepreneurs to fit into the transitional markets and to reduce the economic uncertainty. Consequently, the entrepreneurial transition from rural to urban marketplace is capitalized on digital revolution, dynamic infrastructure (community and shared workplaces), frugal innovation, and commercialization of entrepreneurial products and services. Such transitions broadly encapsulate the transformative change process in entrepreneurial activities for global markets (Donner & Locke, 2019). The pathway for social and economic entrepreneurship from niche market to global market ecosystem has been illustrated in Fig. 3.1. Social entrepreneurship is increasingly adopted as the key driver for sectoral products and services promising positive social change and economic growth of entrepreneurs. The social products related to entrepreneurial innovation in agriculture, housing, health, sustainability, and educational sectors have also raised concerns about expanding the value chain from urban to rural ecosystem among industries. Similarly, social entrepreneurial services such as tourism hosted by local communities had significantly attracted large tourism organizations to develop tourism based on the rural ecosystem by encouraging entrepreneurial services within niche (Newey, 2018). Such geodemographical entrepreneurial dynamics have developed the pathway of

Fig. 3.1 Entrepreneurial transition from niche to global market ecosystem (Source Author)

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entrepreneurial transition from community workplaces at the bottom of the pyramid to large firms nurtured in urban and semi-urban destinations as exhibited in Fig. 3.1. Social entrepreneurship in farm and non-farm sectors engaged in delivering products and services has emerged largely from family entrepreneurship and exhibits entrepreneurial practices of manufacturing and services using community infrastructure. Figure 3.1 indicates attributes of social entrepreneurship, which illustrates the reasons for rural–urban entrepreneurial migration in developing countries. Such entrepreneurial moment to explore better entrepreneurial opportunities in urban ecosystem has also been observed as entrepreneurial exodus during economic recession or natural calamities including diminishing returns on agriculture. The rural–urban entrepreneurial migration is largely affected by resource limitations, niche-based marketing, and conventional management practices (McKercher et al., 2015). In addition, the organizational problems associated with family businesses such as centralized leadership, resistance to change, and adaptation to changing innovation and technology requirements often attract entrepreneurs to urban areas to reestablish their entrepreneurial activities. The changing entrepreneurial business models with a focus on customer-centric marketing and profit orientation have been reinforced through public policies, economic empowerment, and enhancement of resources under various development programs structured by the government and non-governmental organizations. The continuous improvement of entrepreneurial skills to develop capabilities and competencies to adapt to innovation and technology has set new entrepreneurial goals towards upstream marketing through prospecting new industrial alliances, establishing backward and forward linkages, and exploring route to market (direct marketing, digital marketing, and community marketing). Most customer-centric firms in upstream markets in developing countries operate with consortium business philosophy by linking small manufacturing and services enterprises to connect with the mainstream industry as a feeder channel. Such business philosophy not only encourages entrepreneurial transformation but also plays a significant role in improving the value and lifestyle of entrepreneurs. The enterprises in upstream markets serving target customers adapt to proximity- and relationship marketing facilitated by the digitalization of operations and social media support (Florin & Schmidt, 2011). In addition, the industryfocused entrepreneurial perspective and global entrepreneurial concerns

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are also nurtured in the upstream markets through public–private partnerships and public policies to a large extent. The upstream markets contribute to economic growth and sustainability by encouraging micro and small enterprises through marketing mix, branding, value streams, and integrated market communications. However, socio-political dimensions and individual and group behavior of entrepreneurs tend to reconstruct social value through inclusivity and diversity. The crowd dynamics in upstream markets provide opportunities for open innovation, possibilities of crowdfunding to drive cost-effective innovation, and customer-centric marketing effects (Khan & Arokkiaraj, 2021). However, the success of entrepreneurship in upstream markets stimulate reverse migration to the bottom of the pyramid demographic segment with focus on establishing quality entrepreneurial practices to support sustainable economic growth. However, there is a slow trend of reverse migration, which has been observed in the twenty-first century. The entrepreneurial migration from rural to urban destinations has been stimulated by the increasing entrepreneurial attitude towards change proneness, which drives total enterprise-thinking and systems-thinking capabilities. Such entrepreneurial dynamics is widely supported by the advancement of information and communication technology linked to customer-centric profit-oriented business models.

Alternative Entrepreneurial Strategies Entrepreneurial migration to upstream markets with the embedded goals to outreach global markets has attracted inclusivity and diversity in entrepreneurial business. Accordingly, the upcoming micro and small enterprises with innovation and technology support are emerging as wave ventures, which focus on customer-centric innovation, market competitiveness, and sustainable customer values. The wave ventures are built around new products in relatively new categories aiming to market them in a new consumer segment than serving the conventional consumer targets (Otike et al., 2022). Consequently, these enterprises tend to redesign the entrepreneurial value chain with easy accessibility, affordability, and adaptability among new-generation consumers. The access to technology and increasing collective intelligence towards discovering new knowledge and adapting to new product taxonomies have significantly encouraged the conventional entrepreneurs to transform their activities and develop small and sustainable conglomerates of wave

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ventures. Such entrepreneurial venture is commonly known as innovation, technology, or engineering start-ups, which develop capabilities and competencies to establish upstream industrial alliances and also attract the commercialization of reverse innovation. Consequently, many innovative technology-based start-up enterprises have emerged over time to cater to new segments of clients within a broad industry interface. For example, artificial intelligence-based eyewear technology has been a point of attraction for revolutionary start-ups, which aim at developing camera-tracking devices for industrial security. These products monitor individuals’ vision, staring directions, and ascertain the motive. This software has been developed to cater to real time security, buyers’ choice, and human intention perspectives by using computer vision algorithms and increasing human–machine engagement. Such 3D eye-tracking software is targeted to industrial clients such as financial institutions, retailing organizations, and other public organizations, which intend to track individual motives remotely (Yang et al., 2020). The fundamental attributes of new wave entrepreneurship are to provide insights on competitive business growth by developing attractive innovative designs to fit into competitive business models and adapt to omnichannel distribution strategies. Such enterprises focus on faster and cost-effective business strategies by focusing the manufacturing and marketing activities on consumer landscape (Bell & Loane, 2010). The broad spectrum of wave ventures, which are emerging as an alternative solution to conventional entrepreneurship are founded on redesigning the value propositions for new products supported by developing positive perceived value towards the adaptation of products and the ease of use of products. Such consumer behavior encourages the lateral business model for the new wave products and services to establish perceived use value of customers and push these products and services to the streamline market (Capatina et al., 2020). Though alternative growth strategies for micro and small enterprises are complex, they can overwrite the existing socio-economic bottlenecks and conventional practices by developing structured entrepreneurial management strategies. These strategies consist of developing new wave ventures with focus on innovative design, new business models, dynamic distribution channels, direct marketing practices by eliminating operational intermediation, and effective implementation of strategies by entrepreneurial categories and requirements. The alternate growth strategies can be structured as discussed below:

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. Developing new wave ventures focused on innovative products development . Expansion of portfolios . Redesigning business value chain . Developing knowledge pool on entrepreneurship through collective intelligence and challenge-based research . Aggregating the socio-economic and institutional players such as government . Public–private partnership, and non-governmental organizations . Understanding the extent of support from public policies and regulatory measures to support entrepreneurship at the grassroots . Developing entrepreneurial congruence with social and political ideologies within the changing business and market ecosystems, and . Effectively implementing the transfer of technology and knowledge transfer programs to bring the new wave ventures to the contemporary pace. One of the major challenges in developing alternate strategies for new wave ventures is to fit the entrepreneurial design and business models in the changing technology and market landscape. Since the growth of technology and market operations are dynamic, it is often difficult to establish a long-term vision of new wave enterprises and achieve market competitiveness (Turulja & Bajgoric, 2019). However, technology appropriation in micro and small enterprises appears to be a stand-alone strategy to match with innovation and entrepreneurial growth that affect the performance and stabilize the changing dynamics of business and ecosystem. The challenges in structuring new wave enterprises by developing new entrepreneurial philosophy is illustrated in Fig. 3.2. To create new wave enterprises, it is necessary to support creation of new wave through transformed social, entrepreneurial, and political ideologies focusing on co-creation of enterprises with stakeholders and business partners to drive frugal and reverse innovations. In this process, entrepreneurial firms should be founded on resource-based growth in focused market segments. The collective intelligence, collective reasoning, and implementation of structured public policies would support the creation of new entrepreneurial wave congruent with the attributes of generation shift in entrepreneurial ventures as exhibited in Fig. 3.2. Accordingly, building new entrepreneurial wave needs streamlining of entrepreneurial policies focused on market-specific business models

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Fig. 3.2 New wave entrepreneurial evolution (Source Author)

supported by appropriate technologies to attract industrial alliances and public–private partnership. The recent trend in entrepreneurial growth advocates crowd-based business modeling at the grassroots and intermediate upstream business stages within the infrastructure and technologybased workstreams. Such shifts in entrepreneurial management practices drive coevolution through effective stakeholder management and nurturing new wave innovation within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Upon meeting the challenges of creating new wave enterprises and building such waves, the entrepreneurial system requires effective knowledge and technology transfer to improve entrepreneurial skills. Such reinforcement provides market assurance and gaining appropriate returns on investment for the entrepreneurs. These strategies help entrepreneurs in reinforcing the new wave challenges and provide opportunities in structuring the ventures. Entrepreneurial geography in conjunction with market geography serves as the foundation for structuring new wave enterprises, which provide visibility on the ventures that are successful, and those that need transformation in entrepreneurial design, structure, and business models. The entrepreneurial geography provides a spectrum of resources, business opportunities, value propositions, and scope of design thinking

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(Mahato et al., 2021) to serve new customer segments through innovation and differentiation. Structuring new wave enterprises needs a systematic design thinking with focus on 4D factors that comprise discover, design, develop, and deliver to attract new value propositions and business growth (Brown, 2008). The new wave enterprises should be blended with the business experience technology, which helps in exploring PNS factors and building insights into the business needs at macro level (Rajagopal, 2022). Accordingly, knowledge and skills can be imparted to the entrepreneurs to identify the focus areas to develop customer-centric and market-oriented blueprint of manufacturing design (Vrontis et al., 2017). A systematic design thinking helps in developing applied products and services with focus on potential solution that would provide continuous growth for the enterprise. In addition, the continuum of resources and inclusive marketing strategies would help to deliver competitive products and services beyond the niche markets. The new wave ventures have emerged due to a generation shift in the entrepreneurial practices caused by changing landscape of innovation and technology, which focus on cost-effective innovation with extended lifecycle of technology. Consequently, the new wave ventures find a good fit in the transformed market ecosystem through customer-centric business modeling, which helps in developing sustainable value chain management and market competitiveness (Frankenberger et al., 2013). However, to nurture the new wave ventures, it is required to improve the capabilities and competencies of entrepreneurs continuously to rebuild the conventional entrepreneurial bed. The conventional entrepreneurship is largely impeded by family leadership with centralized decision-making and traditional resource management practices. Such leadership effect in enterprises limits the scope of market-driven manufacturing and value creation. The allocation of resources and investment management in conventional enterprises narrows down the innovation and technology prospects, which push the entrepreneurial growth within the niche (Bacq & Alt, 2018). In structuring new wave ventures, the government and social institutions play a significant role in the formation of entrepreneurs and driving the enterprise through various growth phases. The contribution of social and public sector organizations is widely observed in resource management, infrastructure, transferring knowledge on regulatory changes, rights, and empowerment to entrepreneurs. Besides educating entrepreneurs in these areas, the role of government and social

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organizations is to stimulate them towards providing psychosocial motivation and leadership support. However, every new wave enterprise has embedded risks and opportunities concerning the market size, market value creation, constituting management team, discovering technological support, financial management and liquidity, and execution of business to achieve desired scaling of enterprise (Hultberg & Pal, 2021). The major threats in developing new wave enterprises are to adapt to the changing technology, consumer preferences, competitive dynamics, cost escalation, and mitigated risks. These factors contribute to entrepreneurial disruption, which affects the predetermined path of growth of new wave ventures.

Global–Local Entrepreneurial Fusion Global entrepreneurial ventures function on a systematically designed operational blueprint. The local enterprises can draft an operational path analyzing the success streams of global enterprises. A systematic growth of entrepreneurial firms at global scale is observed through dynamic manufacturing and marketing process driven by the real time consumer preferences, market demand, and supply chain requirements. Global entrepreneurial firms operate on real time indicators, which enhances their market competitiveness, customer value, and profitability (Cegarra-Navarro et al., 2019). Consequently, these firms stay in the entrepreneurial mainstream and augment their capabilities and competencies by adapting to the changing patterns of innovation and technology to create value in upstream markets. Most local enterprises have the limitations of conservative product mix and limited market exposure, which affect the scale of business, desired growth, and profitability. One of the major reasons for slow growth of local enterprises is the lack of branding and marketing strategies, which fail to attract customers and drive continuous growth impetus. For the enterprises at the global end, such innovation, technology, and marketing spectrum are very wide, which enables the firms to capture a significant value and growth perspectives. These firms operate on innovation-based business models underneath the market competition, which provides them the scope of disruptive growth against mainstream competition. The digital marketing strategies on shared e-commerce platforms powered by various search engines on the internet provide ambidextrous (B2B, B2C, C2C, O2O)

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solutions to the global enterprises to increase their market competitiveness by opening liberal routes to market. The pay-per-click search engine approach of Google provides attractive advertising offers at marginal cost to lure consumers. In addition, pay-to-serve business model helps global firms capture market value as these companies pay users based on the time spent on navigating the enterprise website. However, the pay-toserve approach provides initial incentives to the customers to develop an interest in the brands of the firm; however, such an approach is not successful in the long-run. The global ventures are also powered by the industry value chain (organic food, fashion, electronics, etc.), competitive pricing strategies, and customized marketing models. These firms also provide an appropriate mix of open and paid services to retain customers and establish differential business models against competitors. The global entrepreneurial firms adapt to open innovation through crowdsourcing and collective intelligence, which tend to create confidence among consumers and inculcate a sense of inclusivity in business. The convergence of global–local entrepreneurial process and expected outcomes are illustrated in Fig. 3.3.

Fig. 3.3 Attributes of global–local entrepreneurial fusion process (Source Author)

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The changing trends in the global customer-centric industry with a focus on ethnicity and sustainability have given significant importance to local enterprises. Similarly, large-scale industries also tend to establish backward linkages for supply chain integration with micro and small enterprises. Consequently, possibilities of the convergence of global enterprises with micro, small, and medium enterprises have been increasingly observed in both the industrial and consumer products segment. The dynamics of global–local entrepreneurial activities is stimulated through industry linkages, digitalization, and social networking across the regions (Ortas et al., 2014). Consortium entrepreneurship in the developing economies is encouraged through public policies and supported by large industries, which ensure enhancing productivity, quality, and performance of local products and services to upstream markets. The focus of global enterprises towards market orientation, competitiveness, and innovation and technology widely supports the philosophy of integrating the local enterprises, which operate in niche marketplace with native social and cultural perspectives. The integration of local enterprises with global entrepreneurial firms ensures value creation among consumers and stakeholders with a focus on the following elements in the business grid: . . . . .

Cost–benefit–growth Integration-risk-growth Cost–benefit–risk Investment–returns–diversification Growth-sustainability–value creation

Global enterprises engaged in the fashion industry are increasingly focusing on sustainability and value creation, which has increased dependency on local enterprises for a specific category of products such as organic textiles, bio-economic high-value products like organic silk and hand-spun textiles. The concern on sustainability has also increased towards biomimicry-based products, which are conventionally designed by local enterprises and used in niche markets such as cultured pearls and plastic artifacts like shells. Such dependency of global enterprises on local artisanal enterprises can be explored in four stages to drive upstream push to local enterprises. While moving from global to local convergence, large enterprises identify commercial potentials across entrepreneurial sectors at the grassroots and develop a systematic design thinking process through

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the transfer of technology (Mallick & Mukhopadhyay, 2001). The success of innovations in the niche market initiated by local entrepreneurs is critically examined by the large enterprises to explore global market opportunities. The manufacturing and marketing of portable electrocardiogram machines (GE Mac 400 and GE Mac 800) by General Electrics has been conceived as a reverse innovation product, which was designed by local entrepreneurs in India to operate with batteries. The adoption of this innovation by General Electrics has increased the market potential of the product and established its omnipresence in the market. The design thinking, transfer of technology, reverse innovation, and exploring opportunities between the local and global enterprises are further strengthened by the diffusion of knowledge on market demand, innovation, and technology through collective intelligence to connect local enterprises. In this process, global enterprises identify the local entrepreneurial potential and help them in managing available resources to test the market potential. The business modeling of local enterprises is largely motivated by collective intelligence acquired through social media. These activities, leading to the convergence of global–local enterprises, are further fortified by imparting market-oriented training and skills, exploring the possibilities to develop alliances and mergers and acquisitions with potential large firms. However, the convergence of business functions between global and local enterprises requires customization to develop congruence with customer preferences and market requirements. Large enterprises explore the potential of local firms by conducting a systematic social and business integration through participatory entrepreneurship appraisal (PEA) by identifying the local resources, innovation potential, and business practices. The PEA helps to document the voice of entrepreneurs, resource management practices, and the contribution of conventional wisdom to enhance the possibilities of commercialization. The global companies sometimes conduct the rapid entrepreneurship appraisal to document quickly the salient features of the enterprise, entrepreneurial practices, and market responsiveness to enable global–local fusion for upstream integration (Mouzas & Bauer, 2022). This process can be described as socialization of entrepreneurship and business for prolific and flawless connectivity between global and local enterprises. Local enterprises, which are an outgrowth of family business firms, are driven by conventional leadership with narrowed product–service mix

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to fit into the niche marketplace. These firms have centralized decisionmaking practices, which often hinder the liberal growth of the enterprise. The public policies in developing economies encourage global–local entrepreneurial fusion by enhancing the global vision and empowering entrepreneurs to take calculated risk for driving enterprises to grow vertical. The political ideology and entrepreneurial philosophy, both in the micro and macro entrepreneurial ecosystems, contribute critically to global–local transformation and fusion of business. Such integration of entrepreneurial business across different ecosystems requires effective transformational leadership and consistent stakeholder engagement (Mitchell et al., 2016). These factors help in transforming organizational design to fit into a new work culture to carry out global vision and upstream business goals. The entrepreneurial mindset congruent with the PNS factors support such entrepreneurial growth prospects. However, in global–local entrepreneurial fusion, there are many embedded dialectics, which need to be meticulously resolved before the blueprint of fusion process (Sorge, 2005).

Case Studies Tata Swach Water Purifier Sustainability is one of the major concerns of large companies which is explored from the consumption pattern at the grassroots. The availability of purified water for the consumers at the bottom of the pyramid and the big middle consumer segment has been an increasing challenge in thickly populated developing economies like India. The local communities practice various ways to purify the water fetched from the ground resources. However, the degree of purification has always been a point of concern for the public health monitoring. The Tata Swatch is a low-cost, non-electric, still water purifier, which uses paddy husk ash as a principal element in water filter to provide clean water. This device is made of paddy husk ash and uses silver nanotechnology; it has a long-life and low-cost alternative for communities in rural India to access safe drinking water. This sustainable water purifier design adheres to the sustainability norms with point-of-use water purification system suitable for the local markets. Tata Chemicals, a subsidiary of Tata Conglomerate, is engaged in promoting this product to rural masses using the 4As marketing strategy comprising awareness, availability, affordability, and adaptability. The company has

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generated awareness among rural communities through social leaders, self-help groups, and farmers’ forums (e-choupal ). The initiative of Tata Chemicals on developing sustainable rice husk ash (RHA)-based still water filter was aimed at overcoming the issues of contamination of water in rural areas. In this process, the major challenge was faced by the company to stimulate the affordability and adaptability to the RHA-based water filters among rural people. Consequently, this innovative product was launched as a frugal innovative solution to attract the rural poor with low-cost and high-benefit attributes. The health campaign on contaminated water-borne diseases reinforced the social consciousness about using the RHA-based water filter (Zou & Yang, 2019). Besides social marketing, the corporate social responsibility-driven activities also encouraged the marketing and adaptation of the product to the rural ecosystem. In this still water filter developed by Tata Chemicals, the RHA comprised activated silica up to 85%, which facilitated the entrapping of pathogenic bacteria, while the activated carbon (5%) has helped in the removal of color and odor from the water. Consequently, such sustainable RHA-based water filter was able to successfully remove odor, color, and particulate impurities from the still water to make it healthy to drink (Madu et al., 2021). The economic viability of this product manufactured by Tata India, which is a multinational company, has been endorsed by the consumer experience of safe drinking water at a new benchmark of approximately INR 30–50 per month for a family of five members. The corporate social responsibility activities associated with the Tata Swatch water purifier include awareness campaigns on drinking healthy water, social consciousness towards sustainable products, and inculcating the sense of self-reliance and patriotism with the company. As a part of corporate social responsibility, Tata Chemicals with the US-based public charity Hawaii Children’s Foundation distributed the RHA-based still water purifiers in villages and primary schools in northern India. The initiative of developing RHA-based still water purifier has successfully established the link between forming community, agribusiness entrepreneurs, and Tata Chemicals as manufacturer and marketer. The buying decision and usability of RHA-based water filters indicated that the optimal choice for such product is influenced by the macro-economic situation, scarcity of water resources, pricing, and associated product lifecycle. However, the use of sustainable products requires a significant social push to encourage stakeholders to adopt innovative devices. The social campaign

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challenges to drive proactive decision-making towards sustainable water filter has faced various management and leadership challenges including the tradeoff between long-term and short-term gains and supporting public policies to encourage people to adapt to sustainable and healthy water filters at subsidized prices (Ngai & Fenner, 2014). General Electric (GE) Company and Entrepreneurship in India GE has been a proactive enterprise in encouraging reverse innovation and commercializing the niche-based innovations at a global scale. The experience of GE in promoting the healthcare device GE Mac 800 (a portable electrocardiogram device) at global scale has been derived from a niche-based reverse innovation. GE has expanded its global activities in developing countries to address social challenges like power, healthcare, and housing. The company’s principal objective in India has been to innovate products and services that are relevant to domestic markets and uplift the potential ones to global markets. The GE in India started looking for solutions to support rural electrification in tune with the political call of the government since 2016. The company initiated a pilot project on Hybrid Distributed Power System (HDPS) in two villages in the state of Bihar, India, in partnership with Tata Power, which aimed at providing power for basic needs such as lighting up bulbs, running fans, and charging mobile phones for a hub of 1000 households. HDPS project of GE has emerged as a single integrated power system consisting of solar, battery, and diesel resources. However, the bulk of electricity generation has been through the renewable power source using photovoltaic panels. The bulk of electricity generation has been contributed by solar power, and the batteries charged through solar power have been used for lighting at the night. The diesel component of the system acted as backup to cope up with the failure of generating solar power. The combination of solar power, batteries, and diesel resources has been identified as a hybrid power system from the innovation standpoint to provide low-cost power in rural areas (Dhamija, 2018). This pilot project has been an emerging example of reverse innovation linking global–local entrepreneurial systems for social sustainability in developing economies. This pilot power project charged a fixed monthly fee to the users to access the power. As the power systems are connectivity-enabled, it allows GE to remotely monitor and analyze the business data such as power usage, charge, and billing contents, which are operated by Tata Power.

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References Bacq, S., & Alt, E. (2018). Feeling capable and valued: A prosocial perspective on the link between empathy and social entrepreneurial intentions. Journal of Business Venturing, 33(3), 333–350. Bell, J., & Loane, S. (2010). ‘New-wave’ global firms: Web 2.0 and SME internationalization. Journal of Marketing Management, 26(3–4), 213–229. Brown, T. (2008). Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86(6), 73–84. Capatina, A., Kachour, M., Lichy, J., Micu, A., Micu, A.-E., & Codignola, F. (2020). Matching the future capabilities of an artificial intelligence-based software for social media marketing with potential users’ expectations. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tec hfore.2019.119794 Cegarra-Navarro, J. G., Papa, A., Garcia-Perez, A., & Fiano, F. (2019). An openminded strategy towards eco-innovation: A key to sustainable growth in a global enterprise. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 148. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119727 Dhamija, A. (2018, April 26). Reverse innovation: Made in India, for the world. Forbes India. Retrieved on August 12, 2022. https://www.forbesindia.com/ article/innovation-nation/reverse-innovation-made-in-india-for-the-world/ 50029/1 Donner, J., & Locke, C. (2019). Platforms at the margins. In M. Graham (Ed.), Digital economies at global margins (pp. 39–41). MIT Press. Florin, J., & Schmidt, E. (2011). Creating shared value in the hybrid venture arena: A business model innovation perspective. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 2(2), 165–197. Frankenberger, K., Weiblen, T., & Gassmann, O. (2013). Network configuration, customer centricity, and performance of open business models: A solution provider perspective. Industrial Marketing Management, 42(5), 671–682. Hultberg, E., & Pal, R. (2021). Lessons on business model scalability for circular economy in the fashion retail value chain: Towards a conceptual model. Sustainable Production and Consumption, 28, 686–698. Judge, W. Q. (2011). Organizational capacity for change dimension 5: Systems thinking. Business Expert Press. Khan, A., & Arokkiaraj, H. (2021). Challenges of reverse migration in India: a comparative study of internal and international migrant workers in the postCOVID economy. Comparative Migration Studies, 9(1). https://doi.org/10. 1186/s40878-021-00260-2 Madu, J. O., Adams, F. V., Agboola, B. O., Ikotun, B. D., & Joseph, I. V. (2021). Purifications of petroleum products contaminated water using modified rice husk ash filters. Materials Today: Proceedings, 38(2), 599–604.

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CHAPTER 4

Designing at the Grassroots

The foundation of entrepreneurship is strengthened by the role of organizations and leadership over the individualistic philosophy of entrepreneurs. A socially conscious society can inhibit the entrepreneurial development process through public policies in establishing the entrepreneurial business. Amidst the rapidly changing socio-economic and commercial dynamics, the entrepreneurship has a major challenge to survive by establishing its unique growth propositions at the initial stage of developing entrepreneurial business. The survival of enterprises at the grassroots has spread across three sub-stages of manufacturing engagement, marketing, and growth. In these stages, the innovation and technology contribute significantly to designing the manufacturing process to develop market-oriented products and services to fit into the existing demand. However, enterprises with unique business propositions tend to explore potential markets identifying the latent demand among consumers while designing and manufacturing the products. Alternatively, enterprises with a futuristic vision engage in educating consumers and preparing markets for a relatively new product by providing consumer education. Consequently, creating market demand for new products is an uphill task and a complex process for entrepreneurs. Conventional entrepreneurship is being gradually substituted by the use of new technology to address social and economic issues at the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9_4

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micro level. The advancement of digital economy has brought a significant turning point towards rethinking the social entrepreneurship model to meet radical changes in market, consumer preferences, and global entrepreneurial connectivity. The foundation of entrepreneurship in twenty-first century is strengthened by the social networks emerging out of the digital economy, which is gradually integrating entrepreneurship, technology, and markets to provide a phenomenal change in delivering entrepreneurial outputs by developing systematic design thinking process. the overview of digital transformation of conventional enterprises can be visualized through agile practices, engagement of employees and stakeholders, social policy implications, and the emergence of corporate social entrepreneurship in the domain of resource management, value creation, internal and external networking, and collective design thinking (Leonidou et al., 2018). Commonly, social enterprises have a longer leap to outreach stakeholders, consumers, and market players through the increasing use of social networking and collaboration with partners to converge the entrepreneurial practices with the digital environment of entrepreneurial ecosystem. The social networking helps in pooling collective intelligence, which provides various perspectives of knowledgebased view in connecting the entrepreneurial skills and practices with the contemporary trend of products and services in the marketplace. Consequently, the digital orientation has emerged as a new pillar in the foundation of entrepreneurship, which is congruent with the changing managerial practices and entrepreneurial initiatives to match with the market trends (Felin & Hesterly, 2007). The penetration of digital technology and disruptive innovation has radically changed the social engagement of entrepreneurs to foster contemporary skills and analyze the role of the individual entrepreneurship in the context of corporate entrepreneurship. Traditionally, the entrepreneurship is founded as a driver to improve social economy and deliver benefits to the stakeholders from the perspective of social welfare and well-being. The altered foundation of entrepreneurship is marketoriented and demands significant investment towards innovation and technology to develop market competitiveness. However, adjusting with social and ethical values seems to be a major challenge in connecting local enterprises with global businesses and induce effective social change alongside the business model. Therefore, it is necessary to redefine the means to overcome conventional social challenges by converging the entrepreneurial efforts with contemporary business and marketing

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Entrepreneurial Dynamics Social entrepreneurship Commercialization Economic drivers Growth proposition Entrepreneurial ecosystem • Start-ups • Spinoffs • Incubators • Design locus

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Entrepreneurial Transformation • Ice breaking • Entrepreneurial journey • Digitalization • Hybridity • Exploring opportunities • Connecting partners • PNS drivers

The Human Element • Leadership • Entrepreneurial philosophy • Individual • Collective • Social networking • Social welfare and well-being • Knowledge-based view

Fig. 4.1 Attributes of entrepreneurship foundation (Source Author)

philosophies. In the context of digital entrepreneurship, developing social initiatives are largely based on industry attractiveness comprising the extent of competition triggered by new entrants, the expected effects of substitution of products and services, and the bargaining power of consumers and suppliers at both ends of entrepreneurs and marketers (Battisti, 2019). The elements contributing to the foundation of entrepreneurial ecosystem in changing business environment is illustrated in Fig. 4.1. The human element is the core attribute of entrepreneurial foundation, which is driven by transformational leadership in marketoriented entrepreneurial philosophy as exhibited in Fig. 4.1. Conventional enterprises were dominated by the individualistic leadership and family-centered entrepreneurial philosophy, while the change drivers have induced collective leadership, which is explained as the PACT maxim comprising people, accountability (reverse), control, and transformation (Rajagopal, 2022). Entrepreneurial transformation is enormously supported by the social networking and knowledge-based view to deliver social welfare and well-being. However, the entrepreneurial dynamics often raise several challenges towards commercialization and

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growth propositions, which are sensitive to social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystem englobing start-ups, spinoffs and incubators. Though economic drivers support entrepreneurial transition from conventional to contemporary state, determining the design locus is often a major challenge for transitional enterprises. Therefore, entrepreneurial transformation needs thorough ice breaking to begin the new entrepreneurial journey. Digitization and hybridity help entrepreneurs to explore the opportunities emerging in markets by understanding the changing PNS factors and market preferences. These shift drivers are supported by public policies and corporate trends to explore connecting business partners and developing strategic alliances to converge the partnership of large companies with micro, small and medium enterprises. Such drivers are therefore driven by the consortium entrepreneurial development strategy, which helps these enterprises to serve as feeder channel for large enterprises. In addition, micro and small enterprises are also benefitted through collective intelligence and crowd-based business modeling to strengthen their enterprise foundation and achieve market competitiveness for their own brands parallelly. In view of the entrepreneurial dynamics and transformation process, the entrepreneurial scope is largely determined by their engagement with innovation and technology, cocreation, stakeholder engagement, and design thinking. The entire process of entrepreneurial transformation is subjected to SMART attributes which streamline the process and keep entrepreneurs abreast with the market trends. The entrepreneurship today has evolved around a new generation entrepreneurial ecosystem comprising start-ups, spinoffs, and enterprise incubators, which provide near proximity to a wider scale of business and collaborative partnership unlike confining entrepreneurial growth to niche markets. The rise of entrepreneurial business models based on digital systems, skills, and strategies aid in exploring business opportunities, developing new wave entrepreneurial thinking, and transforming traditional operations to improved work processes. Accordingly, the foundation of entrepreneurship is largely based on SMART perspectives, which include strategic, measurable, achievable, responsive, and timely business propositions. These perspectives encourage the development of collective and peer-to-peer design for products and services through shared knowledge and decision-making processes (Kaine & Josserand, 2019). Developing entrepreneurship on the new digital foundation helps to improve entrepreneurial practices with the forward-looking

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perspectives focusing on the interface between the inner system of entrepreneur and the outer environment. Such interface builds convergence between start-up enterprises at the grassroots and the worldview of entrepreneurial opportunities. Such entrepreneurial leap to connect business beyond the niche environment drives through the complex mechanisms of integrating resources, innovation, technology, quality, and market demand in a continuous process (Dimov & Pistrui, 2020). The conventional entrepreneurial philosophy was similar to a sweepstake game of gaining random opportunity to establish entrepreneurship and succeed in business. Unlike the sweepstakes, a systematic marketdriven and relationship-based entrepreneurial evolution is visualized in the contemporary entrepreneurial foundation wherein the entrepreneurs can set entrepreneurial goals with global perspective (Dimov, 2021). Transformation of conventional entrepreneurship to hybrid entrepreneurial organizational design is a long journey of design thinking from traditional approach through market ecosystem. Digitalization in manufacturing and marketing has played a significant role in driving entrepreneurship through the transformational phase from conventional to contemporary entrepreneurial system. This has helped in conceptualizing the innovation and exploring opportunities through the interphase between entrepreneurs and market forces by linking organized entrepreneurs and their operational environment. The entrepreneurial journey has transformed from tangible and intangible mediums to continuous learning and adapting based on the philosophy of knowing, doing, and being to explore opportunities and create value in the changing market dynamics. The radical conceptualization and organized design thinking both have significantly contributed to exploring the opportunities and resolving the PNS factors from the perspectives of customers. However, the lack of systematic understanding of the availability of competitive opportunities and the existing gaps have created complexities in establishing design locus in the context of dynamic preferences of customers and market demand. Consequently, developing entrepreneurial business models in tune to the radical market shifts and digitalization requires consortium strategy integrating homogeneous enterprises than designing individual enterprises to gain market competitiveness. Transforming the entrepreneurship from a design thinking perspective with a future-oriented approach is a recursive process, which needs to be driven from the perspective of continuous shifts in market and consumption ecosystems (Berglund et al., 2020). The design perspective can be

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successful in offering insights that are contextual to the PNS factors and focused on objective (social and marketing) and subjective (profit with purpose) duality. The design perspectives in transforming entrepreneurial philosophy and functional domain evolve with changing opportunities and create both intrinsic and extrinsic values to support the distinction of innovation and cocreation. Therefore, it is necessary to link the retrospective and prospective design development process to develop new ventures in the contemporary entrepreneurial and market ecosystems. The contemporary entrepreneurial designs should provide both generalized and contextualized insights to enhance the market effectiveness, and utilitarian and hedonic design processes for entrepreneurial products. Adapting to such design process, enterprises need to identify the market-driven process, strategic alliances with large companies, public policies, and business regularities to develop transformed entrepreneurial practices and pragmatic market approaches (Romme & Dimov, 2021). In the new venture creation, the contemporary design process comprising discovering, defining, ideation, prototype development, and value testing, besides lean start-ups and customer development needs to be practiced to achieve market competitiveness and develop a unique posture.

Entrepreneurial Innovation Process In the contemporary context, the entrepreneurial innovations have two distinctive facets: local innovations are carried out generically within the local ecosystem, and progressive innovations are often adapted to external ideation based on the rate of success of innovation globally. In this process, carrying out local innovations is not a broad entrepreneurial problem, whereas adapting to external innovations leads to technology, market, and consumption mismatch. The innovations are nurtured in local enterprises based on the individual level of cognition and experience. However, such generic innovations face market risk due to a lack of appropriate business modeling. Therefore, entrepreneurial innovations should be driven to bridge both the micro and macro business ecosystems within the locale of individual entrepreneurs of avoiding multiple overlapping contexts. Such context to innovation emerges out of organizational, institutional, social, and technological spheres across spatial and temporal dimensions (Nelson, 2014). Entrepreneurial innovations in developing economies often succumb to the lack of financial resources,

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technology, and skills to link generic innovations with macro marketing streams. Consequently, encapsulation of innovation process within the niche market constitutes a major, complex problem among local enterprises. The entrepreneurial incubators in developing countries nurture innovations with a focus on their commercialization, stakeholder integration, and financial inclusion. Such incubators have shown positive effects on innovation in various developing economies including India and Africa (Allard & Williams, 2020). However, diffusion of innovation out of the incubators often encounters internal conflicts and market displacements due to the ACCA factors comprising diffusion of awareness, comprehension of innovation, developing stakeholder conviction, and stimulating buying action in micro and macro market ecosystems (Rajagopal, 2019). In the technological context, entrepreneurial innovations tend to explore the possibilities and limitations to nurture innovation within the proposed product mix in a given industrial space and market ecosystem. The adoption of technology is largely driven by the cost, lifecycle, complexity, and resource utilization of entrepreneurial firms or individual entrepreneurs. Therefore, formal institutional and public policies help in delimiting the technological boundaries and restrictions for inducting technology-led innovation in local enterprises. In addition, developing knowledge and skills among local entrepreneurs appears to be an organizational challenge, which determines the commercial domain of entrepreneurial innovations developed by various levels of local enterprises. The organizational systems and entrepreneurial culture also influence the individual decisions on managing innovation projects using contemporary technologies to make the products and services mix commercially viable (Von Gelderen et al., 2000). Previous studies on the performance of start-up enterprises indicate that there are various measures of success of commercializing innovations within the macroeconomic and niche level, which help in determining the consumption behavior and the societal impacts on innovative products of enterprises. The collaborative approaches between large companies and local enterprises under the public policy programs help entrepreneurs in developing knowledge and skills for managing innovation projects, process models, and planning for incremental innovations to make continuous presence in the marketplace (Agarwal & Shah, 2014). The changing consumer preferences, market trends, and consumption needs significantly influence the entrepreneurial innovation process and prospects for societal recognition in various entrepreneurial sectors. Accordingly, local entrepreneurs are

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engaged in managing entrepreneurial conflicts in commercializing innovations. However, the gap between exploring new areas of innovation and exploiting resources to manage innovations at various stages requires adequate industrial space and process alignment (Barbieri & Álvares, 2016). Innovation Process The fundamental challenge in entrepreneurial innovation is managing the ideation process internally and externally with commercial validation. As most entrepreneurial firms at micro level emerge as an outgrowth of family business firm, the speed of innovation is often hindered by conventional pattern of products and services, delivery options, and market approachability. Consequently, the pace of innovation in the conventional entrepreneurial firms is low as compared to the contemporary generation of entrepreneurs who focus on frugal and radical innovations. Internal ideation is often driven by self-reference and peer participation who contribute to the growth of enterprise as referrals or have stakes in the enterprise. The external ideation process is largely founded on social networks, which offer enormous collective intelligence illustrating the business and consumption trends. The collectively generated ideas need to be screened from the perspective of economic viability to analyze cost, time, risk, and cost–benefit risk matrix. In addition, technological feasibility in the context of technology lifecycle, disruption, and adaptability needs to be considered as a filter in finalizing the innovative ideas derived internally or externally through crowdsourcing. Based on the effective screening of ideas for innovation, entrepreneurs must engage in concept development for innovation encompassing the PNS factors, complementarity, and consumption behavior (Rajagopal, 2016a). The blueprint of concept development leads to the development of innovation prototype, which should be subjected to the consumer jury for pre-market testing appraisal. Consumer jury should be constituted with various players representing consumer segments, product and service engineers, business administrators, decision makers, and legal advisors (for potential conflicts for design and patenting). Upon approval of the jury on the prototype of the innovative products and services, entrepreneurs need to develop foreground for market testing, which is a very crucial process to be tested across the market outlets of geodemographic segments to ensure the consumer preferences and salability of products. Alongside the

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market testing process, entrepreneurs also need to develop a business case for innovative products and services by analyzing the market demand and potential market conflicts within the existing market competition. The business case for innovative products guides entrepreneurs in launching the product, and benchmarking for development of next generation of innovation to enhance the scope of market and performance. Accordingly, in the context of the projected rate of success of products, the economies of scale and mass production prospects need to be decided by the entrepreneurs (Rajagopal, 2016a, 2019). Crowdsourcing and collective intelligence encourage entrepreneurs to engage in open innovation, which is a novel approach to cocreate innovation at low cost through design thinking process. The stakeholder’s contribution in open innovation process is beyond organizational boundaries as this approach is facilitated by information technology, design technology, and knowledge hubs to proactively cater the conceptualization and development of innovation products. The technology design platforms like GitHub facilitates entrepreneurs to develop computer-aided designing for customer-centric and industrial products in an open innovation process, which is also contributed by external stakeholders to improve the fundamental concepts embedded with the innovations. Such technology platforms have led to the increasing popularity of computer-aided innovative design networks and ecosystems by integrating opensource communities, crowdsourcing, and virtual marketplaces to nurture innovative ideas to conceptualize innovation. The networking platforms for entrepreneurial innovations have contributed significantly to interactive innovation process against conventional approaches followed by micro and small family business firms. Consequently, open innovation has emerged as a rich tool for innovative learning, cocreation, and socializing innovation concepts (West et al., 2014). The leadership practices towards encouraging open innovation have helped entrepreneurs not only in developing commercial prototypes, but also in creating social capital through collective intelligence and stakeholder collaboration with various open players in social and market ecosystems. The transformational leadership has significantly encouraged open innovations in micro and small enterprises serving in businessto-consumer and business-to-business segments towards recognizing new opportunities and developing market competitiveness. Accordingly, entrepreneurs have learnt to rationally mobilize internal and external resources and link them with productive innovation by connecting

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both upstream and downstream markets (Wang et al., 2015). However, working with open innovations leads to several challenges concerning the economic viability and technological feasibility of innovative ideas and its blueprint for commercialization. The most evident challenge in managing open innovations is attracting collaborative initiatives and streamlining the product attributes pertaining to complementarities and comparative utilitarian values of similar products available in the market. Consequently, though the open innovation is stakeholder-oriented, it gets complex due to diverse actors, transient members, unaffiliated innovators, and associated cost-time-risk (CTR) and cost–benefit–profit (CBP) perspectives. Despite these challenges, open innovation initiatives have promising scope to cocreate value and develop a sustainable market over time. As discussed earlier in this section, the new product development is a bricolage of activities in several stages under the social and market ecosystems as discussed in Fig. 4.2. To meet the challenge of exploring innovative ideas as kick-off products for micro and small enterprises, most entrepreneurs struggle externally and internally to achieve a consensus. Entrepreneurs explore ideas externally through crowdsourcing by inviting the new concepts from the stakeholders on social media. The process of idea generation is also open to public through social media networks, which generates abundant information and constitutes a huge repository of collective intelligence by pooling contextual knowledge. Enterprises with effective organizational design and work culture explore ideas through internal sources through employee engagement, transformational leadership, competitive market vision, and experiential design. In addition, successful enterprises with effective management approaches work on design thinking process to generate new ideas through internal computer aided and social interface. Broadly, both internal and external approaches to drive innovative ideas allow space for open innovation considering the changing market dynamics and consumer preferences. The pooled ideas are subjected to logical and scientific screening to explore the economic viability and technological feasibility. An idea or a cluster of ideas, which is successfully screened through, is used for concept development and prototype development. Concept development is similar to an innovation blueprint, which is meticulously conceived by analyzing the consumer preferences, competition and retailscape, and complementarity. In this stage, the lifecycle of innovative products from the perspective of its perceived use value and adaptability to market

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Social interface Internal • Employee engagement • Leadership and vision • Experiential designing • Design thinking

External • Crowdsourcing • Collective intelligence • Open innovation • Public policies • Industry alliance • Consortium • Internationalization

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Social ecosystem Market ecosystem Innovation ideas

Driver 1 Driver 2 • Technology platforms • Digitalization • Social media and networking • E-commerce

Idea screening • Economic viability • Technological feasibility

Concept development Prototype Development

Concept development • Consumer preferences • Competition and retailscape • Complementarity • Product lifecycle

• Market testing • Business case development • Product launch • Commercialization • Mass production

Prototype Development • Innovation charter • Scope creep effects • Consumer jury

Fig. 4.2 Innovative product development process (Source Author)

demand is also measured. This stage is followed by prototype development, in which a comprehensive innovation charter considering the stage-gate process is structured. The entrepreneurs meticulously manage this stage by developing work breakdown structure and closely monitor the development by stages. The stage-gate process is subjected to CTR and CBP concepts to prevent the scope creep effects causing the induction of additional tasks in the work breakdown structure. The scope creep affects the CTR and CBP factors and makes the innovative product less competitive in the market. In addition, the innovative prototypes are evaluated by the consumer jury comprising potential consumers, suppliers and retailers, product engineers, business administrators, and legal experts. A successful evaluation of the innovative prototypes is further subjected to market testing by identifying influential markets within the threshold of consumers. Based on the results of market testing, entrepreneurs need to develop a business case to map the prospects and challenges of the business within the given market ecosystem. A comprehensive business case guides the entrepreneurs in launching the product and developing strategies for its commercialization. Micro and small enterprises launch

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products using proximity approach by measuring the influence of proximity among potential markets. This approach leads to the design hub and spoke model of supply chain to cover the proximity-based product launch and services. New product development process is driven by the organizational and technological factors. The first driver supporting the development of innovative products encompasses the patronage of public policies, industrial alliances, and entrepreneurial consortiums. The internationalization of innovative products is driven by the above factors, which encourages the tie-up of local–global entrepreneurial business trajectory. In addition, the second set of drivers comprising low-cost technology platforms like GitHub helps entrepreneurs to successfully embark open innovation. The digitalization has circularly supported the open innovation process through social media and networking. Consequently, the open innovation products have been uplifted by the e-commerce companies and helped in popularizing locally cocreated brands. The exponential growth in computer-aided designing platforms have largely provided the benefits of the machine age to the entrepreneurs, which offer low cost and revisable innovation designs to match with the changing consumer preferences and market demand. Therefore, the computer-aided designing has been propelled by numerous alternatives to match with market requirements and equipped with an array of competitive benefits for the users such as design ergonomy, processing speed, and sensors. As most micro and small enterprises in developing economies are engaged in developing mobile and computer-based applications, they have been benefitted from the accumulated digital power, which has enhanced marketability of innovations at low cost of production. The digitalization of services associated with innovative products has also contributed significantly to the existing social and economic systems by increasing the perceived use value and ease of use of innovations among customers (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2015).

Organizational Design The organizational design of micro and small enterprises is largely small in size and conventional in operations as they are the outgrowth of family business, which observe the centralized leadership within the trajectory of succession in leadership across generations. Consequently, radical shifts in organizational design driven by transformational leadership are often a rare phenomenon. The fundamental concern in organizational design

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is to overcome the management practices that are inherently resistant. In view of such entrepreneurial attributes, the organizational design is largely confined to structural limitations, conventional processes, and reward systems that are orchestrated over the years within the family leadership. However, these attributes limit the scope of design, ability towards making strategic decisions, organizational identity, and capabilities and competencies. In the changing business environment with focus on digitization, hybridity, and agility in management, the organizational design of micro and small entrepreneurial ventures is focusing on cost–benefit and profit perspectives to implement new organizational designs. The blend of payroll employees and outsourced ad hoc task force has opened new platforms of organizational design, which has been introduced through the hybrid culture in organizational designing by optimizing the technology usage and minimizing the cost. Therefore, hybrid organizations are driven by transformational leadership to overcome the conventional design structures and have encouraged the build-to-change phenomenon by redefining employee engagement, cocreation, and innovation in organizational decision processes. The changing organizational design structure is slowly replacing the hierarchical command and control with shared leadership by engaging employees and collaborators (Worley & Lawler II, 2006). With the increasing demand for the products and services in a competitive market ecosystem, entrepreneurial firms have the major challenge to expand their outreach to stakeholders and customers to sustain the turbulence in market and maintain competitiveness. With the expansion of outreach to stakeholders and customers, it has become vital for most enterprises in developing economies to understand the cultural differences, expectations of stakeholders and clients, and project the profit and growth trajectory of the firm. Accordingly, most enterprises encounter the severity of competitive dynamics and the complexity of working in teams with multitasking within cultural diversities in an organization. However, it is necessary for a transformational leader to control the organizational chaos by streamlining various organizational functions including communication, monitoring and evaluation, persuasion, collective leadership, decision-making, developing inter organizational trust, reducing the incidence of disagreements, and scheduling team activities with a focus on the delivery of output to gain competitive advantage. The changing leadership and leader-member exchange patterns, extensive adoption of team workplace dynamics, and collective intelligence emerging from both

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internal and external sources have helped in changing the organizational design and workplace functionality to drive micro and small firms at par with the companies adopting successful business models. The collective intelligence, cocreation, employee engagement, team culture, and bottom-up decision-making have significantly influenced the work culture and organizational design to improve capabilities, competencies, and competitiveness. Consequently, such change comes out of enormous business challenge with multiple perspectives including the changes in leadership, synchronization of activities, and synergy across the team members. However, managing inclusivity and diversity in entrepreneurial firms as an embedded organizational design is one of the major challenges, which demands the integration of stakeholders and clients of varied backgrounds to work as a team (Meyer, 2014). In view of the above discussion, restructuring the organizational design and leaping to new work culture practices is a fundamental move towards change management in an organization. It is a common experience that change management in enterprises brings significant changes towards gaining competitive strength and profitability (Rajagopal, 2018). It does not appear to be a soft issue of change in leadership behavior and motivation but has several hard factors on the other facets of change management, which include the change initiatives, project management, coordination, and streamlining different stages of the process to reach out the predetermined objectives. The change management, therefore, calls for a systematic drive through the following considerations (Rajagopal, 2016a): • Defining the need for change, taking-up measurable initiatives, • Carrying out information analysis related to the CTR and CBP factors along with improving the capabilities and competencies, • Implementation of change management as a linear project without incurring the scope creep in the project, and • Developing stage-gate process in change management to implement the checks and balances effectively and control the change management process. The change management process, therefore, needs to be taken up as a project of reasonable duration to derive the effective outputs. Longterm change management process might experience chaos due to changes

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in CTR and CBP factors affecting the quality of output. The complex change management initiatives also have the risk of continuity in stakeholder engagement and maintaining the predetermined work breakdown structure. Consequently, long-term change management projects encounter failures due to scope creep and effective deployment of quality functions at the critical stages of the change management process. In firms using collective intelligence, crowdsourcing, and crowd funding, the change management initiatives need to be effectively supported by the voice of stakeholders and customers to have an integrated effect on design structure and functionality of the firm (Rajagopal, 2021b).

Building Entrepreneurship at Grassroots Designing entrepreneurial activities at the bottom-of-the-pyramid requires a holistic approach to provide social, economic, and regulatory support to the entrepreneurs to enable them to grow within the social and business ecosystem. The fundamental attribute of the social ecosystem is to provide entrepreneurs with contemporary knowledge and inculcate confidence in entrepreneurial trades. The public policies must elaborate fundamental rights to entrepreneurs to help them in exploring the right trade for the right market and emphasize the fundamental rights to resources, technology, and managerial support while nurturing the entrepreneurial trades. It requires social and economic empowerment to entrepreneurs to enable them to practice the design thinking strategies linking with contemporary demand for the products. Public policies in developing economies encourage entrepreneurship in the context of business orientation, which helps them in developing business-to-consumer and business-to-business entrepreneurial models. In addition, the social empowerment of entrepreneurs helps them explore the PNS factors and develop a horizontal growth path within the existing social ecosystem. The personality of entrepreneurs, family business backgrounds, and orientation towards social enterprises bring entrepreneurs to the foreground of business. Accordingly, entrepreneurs are able to explore appropriate business models for entrepreneurial trades in the context of geo-demographical attributes. However, in orienting entrepreneurs towards contemporary businesses, entrepreneurial education is an important tool to integrate the knowledge, skills, and practices in specific entrepreneurial trades. To update entrepreneurial knowledge, continuous training and skill development activities constitute the core requirement,

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which are managed through public policies and social institutions like cooperatives and self-help groups in developing countries. The entrepreneurial education is one of the basic requirements in building entrepreneurship. Consequently, public policies and self-help groups in developing countries are proactive in providing entrepreneurial education, business capabilities, and competencies to enable them to face the challenge of growing competition. Entrepreneurs with contemporary knowledge on technology and business skills are able to outperform the market competition beyond the niche and not only develop social identity, but also grow economically with the potential to align with large industries. Therefore, the 3E elements comprising empowerment, engagement, and excellence in business activities integrate the economic equity and profitability of business-oriented entrepreneurs. The empowerment of entrepreneurs at the grassroots in developing economies largely depends on entrepreneurial knowledge, business ecosystem, social structure, and entrepreneurial pedigree (growing out of the family business firms). The economic empowerment leads to access to both financial and technological resources, which also brings investment potential, economic equality, and working on profit-oriented enterprises. Enhanced investment potential enables entrepreneurs in improving production performance, streamlining marketing activity, adapting to new technologies, and establishing a supply chain to support continuous production. Inculcating leadership among entrepreneurs is a major challenge to restore the voice of entrepreneurs within society, market, and political platforms. Therefore, progressive entrepreneurial philosophy consistently argues to overcome the conventional leadership and adapt to transformational ideologies at the social and political levels. The transformed leadership helps enterprises in changing their managerial practices and adapting to collective decisions by engaging stakeholders and keeping watch on the changing trends through collective intelligence. In developing countries, the entrepreneurial governance, and innovation- and technology-oriented programs are jointly implemented through the government and non-governmental organizations, which aim at enhancing the participation of entrepreneurs to upgrade their knowledge on entrepreneurial trades and business. The Council for Advancement of Peoples Action and Rural Technology (CAPART), an organization promoted by the government of India, incorporating regional self-help groups has emerged as a principal resource in providing entrepreneurial education, technology, and skills. The entrepreneurs

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are benefited with various economic, operational, and technological programs of CAPART such as rural trade fares, and young Professional Schemes. This organization helps entrepreneurs in providing information on project guidelines through publications, technology-led best practices, and market opportunities to orient their nascent enterprises. CAPART is engaged in catalyzing and coordinating people’s participation by developing partnerships between voluntary organizations and the government structure for sustainable development in rural areas. CAPART delivers appropriate technologies and implementation of technology-led projects like generation and distribution of biomass energy, solar energy, refining natural fiber such as coir and jute, and manufacturing organic textiles. Such blending of government and voluntary organizations develops various capacity building programs within the entrepreneurial community to improve economic self-sufficiency and encourage micro enterprises to grow out of family businesses with market orientation. Leading entrepreneurs also participate as transformational leaders within the entrepreneurial community to enhance the entrepreneurial values, knowledge, collective know-hows, and idiosyncrasies. These attributes are linked to the generation of social consciousness by intertwining self-consciousness and social self-concept to develop appropriate organizational skills. Micro enterprises in developing economies face many challenges in establishing business-oriented enterprises due to the lack of resources and business orientation, inadequate technological skills, and impediments in entrepreneurial governance. The programs of government and voluntary organizations build entrepreneurial capacity in entrepreneurial governance and marketing management through innovative pedagogical programs and replication of best practices. Such social, economic, and political advocacy in developing countries helps to reduce the gap among entrepreneurial opportunities, marketing, technology, and appropriate governance. Consequently, the success of rural and semiurban entrepreneurs is not solely attributed to family business designs, but also to their continuous education and organizational soft skills like entrepreneurial planning, business modeling, transformational leadership, and appropriate skills for managing resources. The changing strategic outlook on entrepreneurial growth emphasizes the technological abilities of entrepreneurs towards determining strategic business models, identifying and mitigating risks, and aligning tactical and strategic decisions towards implementing business-oriented entrepreneurial goals.

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These attributes embed inclusivity, diversity, financial stability, cultural marketing, and connecting social values in developing sustainable entrepreneurship within the changing business ecosystem.

Case Studies AMUL: The Network Firm The Anand Milk Union Limited (AMUL) is an outgrowth of cooperative movement during the White Revolution in India, which was established with the objective of providing a better business model for the dairy farmers. The concept of dairy cooperatives rose into prominence in response to the collective voice against the exploitation of marginal milk producers in the city of Anand in the Western Gujarat State of India. This organization has emerged as a cooperative network over the years, and is supported by the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and the public policies in protecting the interest of dairy farmers and their business. The organization of dairy cooperatives are multilayered from the primary cooperatives to the national federation (Bellur et al., 1990). AMUL has been a business firm to support the dairy products at commercial scale developed from the basic resource of milk produced and distributed by the dairy cooperatives at different levels. AMUL has combined market- and social development objectives by establishing production, distribution, and marketing networks within the changing scenarios of dairying and product marketing ecosystems. One of the principal objectives of business networking of AMUL was to extend the benefit of business to a larger population including suppliers and consumers by marginalizing the impact of intermediaries in milk and milk products marketing. This objective has been designed to be achieved in a strategic way by developing values across people and processes that are robust, adaptable, replicable, and transparent. Accordingly, the organizational design of AMUL was founded on reverse accountability by encouraging the stakeholder engagement in organizational decisions and governance. Broadly, the stakeholder engagement in dairy cooperatives and its subsidiaries like AMUL has drawn the attention of peopleled organizational design driven by the emerging model PACT, which emphasizes people’s participation, stakeholder accountability, collective control, and goal-oriented transformation.

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AMUL has developed distinct capabilities in market-oriented decisionmaking to gain a competitive advantage and achieve long-term cost containment to profitably maintain the economies of scale by fencing the intervention of competitors. AMUL prioritizes marginal dairy farmers as basic suppliers and plans to provide desired economic benefits against the intermediaries. Consequently, the organization has developed a network of entrepreneurs to nurture its cooperative business model with an objective to deliver profitable and equitable returns to the stakeholders. Such bottom line of the business model encouraged stakeholder engagement with an objective to grow collectively and improve their economic status. Such cooperative business model has contained the cost while expanding the benefits to the stakeholders by leading the market in the dairy products segment. The uninterrupted supplies of milk and the consistency in the economies of scale have driven the company to the posture of market leader despite the penetration of multinational dairy companies like Nestle (Gold et al., 2013). The company has maintained the business strategy cube emphasizing design-to-market, design-to-society, and design-to-value with a focus on procuring milk from each stakeholder and offering high dividends by selling the milk and milk products in urban markets (Rajagopal, 2021b). Over time, AMUL has emerged as a corporate brand of Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) by incorporating it in an integrated organizational design to provide a comprehensive business model favoring the simultaneous development of suppliers and customers. The choice of product mix and the sequence of market intervention by AMUL brand has been consistent with the stakeholder-oriented philosophy to protect the suppliers of liquid milk and marketing with a progressive product mix in urban markets. Such combination of product mix and marketing mix has given leverage to the AMUL brand to enjoy near monopoly in the upstream markets over long period from its inception to the early decades of twenty-first century. The organizational design of AMUL Pattern has exhibited inspiring leadership and upholding high stakeholder values to build networks at the grassroots and higher layers to coordinate for leveraging stakeholder benefits and market competitiveness. The networking of dairy cooperatives has grown through several layers including the organizational networks, which promotes the voice of stakeholders to support decision-making, and exhibits a large cooperative business model in the marketplace. Building organizational network is founded on the philosophy of collectivism, which represents the stake of milk producers and

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processors at the level of primary cooperative society and above. AMUL has already exhibited robust coordination between the extensive network of producers and marketing organization GCMMF to support the stakeholders and improve the social values and quality of life. The GCMMF plays a significant role in allocating productions across milk unions in the country and decides on the market-oriented product mix at each location of the cooperative milk union. The federation also intervenes in pricing and product mix choices from the perspective of market competition and demand. The economy of scale-based pricing structure encourages the participating brands of milk unions, which are integrated under the umbrella brand of AMUL to exhibit the brand strength through 4A’s grid comprising awareness, availability, affordability, and adaptability. The contemporary marketing strategies including the contextual campaigns of AMUL brand have been able to strengthen products from all participating milk unions under the umbrella of AMUL brand. The core and peripheral organizational design of dairy cooperatives comprising AMUL and GCMMF meticulously focus on the total quality management (TQM) at the grassroots to ensure leadership commitments, reinforce operational and strategic capabilities in the network, and encourage continuous stakeholder engagement. The training for transformational leadership among the stakeholders to foster bottom-up objectives and aligning the policies of effective management has been the part of organizational deliverables. The training for dairy farmers and their families in the context of human and animal health has brought significant social change among different layers of dairy cooperatives across regions in India. The dairy cooperative model of AMUL has been a joint success of leadership and stakeholders’ participation, which has been replicated across the Indian states with a focus on improving the social and economic conditions of dairy farmers households. However, the growth of cooperatives at the grassroots has been hampered significantly by the vested political interest, which has affected the social and business causes of the embedded organizational design (Jain, 2022). In addition, the penetration of multinational companies like Nestle and Unilever are increasingly marking their presence in the consumer markets, which has generated fierce competition with various products of AMUL. These competitors are marketing value-added products like flavored milk and yogurt as against the natural products of AMUL. The multi brand retailers in the Indian market have also exhibited threats to squeeze AMUL’s margin by undermining its low-price strategy and low-cost distribution network (Deshpande et al., 2016).

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Nelson, A. J. (2014). From the ivory tower to the startup garage: Organizational context and commercialization processes. Research Policy, 43(7), 1144–1156. Rajagopal. (2016a). Innovative business projects: Breaking complexities, building performance (Vol. 1): Fundamentals and project environment. Business Expert Press. Rajagopal. (2016b). Innovative business projects: Breaking complexities, building performance (Vol. 2): Financials, new insights, and project sustainability. Business Expert Press. Rajagopal. (2018). Shifts in business-politics paradigms: Exploring lessons and future growth. In Rajagopal & R. Behl (Eds.), Business governance and society: Analyzing shifts, conflicts, and challenges (pp. 1–13). Springer. Rajagopal. (2019). Contemporary marketing strategy: Analyzing consumer behavior to drive managerial decision making. Palgrave Macmillan. Rajagopal. (2021a). Crowd-based business models—Using collective intelligence for market competitiveness. Springer. Rajagopal. (2021b). The business design cube: Converging markets, society, and customer values to grow competitive in business. Business Expert Press. Rajagopal. (2022). Evolving with inclusive business in emerging markets: managing the new bottom-line. Business Expert Press. Romme, A. G. L., & Dimov, D. (2021). Mixing oil with water: Framing and theorizing in management research informed by design science. Designs, 5(1), 1–16. Von Gelderen, M., Frese, M., & Thurik, R. (2000). Strategies, uncertainty and performance of small business startups. Small Business and Economics, 15(3), 165–181. Wang, X. H. F., Fang, Y., Qureshi, I., & Janssen, O. (2015). Understanding employee innovative behavior: Integrating the social network and leader– member exchange perspectives. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(3), 403–420. West, J., Salter, A., Vanhaverbeke, W., & Chesbrough, H. (2014). Open innovation: The next decade. Research Policy, 43(5), 805–811. Worley, C. G., & Lawler, E. E., III. (2006). Designing organizations that are built to change. MIT Sloan Management Review, 48(1), 19–23.

CHAPTER 5

Entrepreneurial Growth: Circular and Sectoral Perspectives

The entrepreneurial activities adhere to manufacturing and marketing of recyclable and eco-friendly products with an internal locus of control, transformational leadership, and sociological perspectives of entrepreneurship. Principles of circular economy, value propositions, business transformation, and environmental mining to explore entrepreneurial opportunities, are discussed in this chapter. In addition, co-creation and co-evolution of circular entrepreneurial models by examining the potential opportunities and threats are discussed in this chapter. Establishing the link of circular entrepreneurship with sectoral entrepreneurship, this chapter discusses also, the entrepreneurial attributes and practices in five major socio-economic sectors comprising agribusiness, energy, housing, social health, and non-farm enterprises including services. The sustainable agribusiness entrepreneurship contributes to poverty alleviation and economic well-being at the bottom-of-the-pyramid. Such entrepreneurship is focused on employment and income generation to gain profit by reducing the incidence of poverty in the developing economies. In addition, this chapter focuses on the energy sector in the context of peoples’ participation and cooperatives stimulating energy enterprises at the grassroots as social institution. Such entrepreneurship has emerged in the developing economies as a new organizational form, which provides services to improve the social ecosystem by involving stakeholders in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9_5

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different ways. Social entrepreneurs offer innovative health services, which are supported by the public policies and corporate partnerships in developing economies. This chapter also discusses the role of strategic partnerships in health and housing entrepreneurship at the grassroots blending the role of public policies, social institutions, and corporate partnerships. The philosophy of circular economy has significantly influenced the new generation entrepreneurs who integrate sustainability and frugal innovation to provide new designs for value and lifestyle by reducing the material waste. This refers to continuous production within the linear economy by reusing the industrial and natural waste to develop innovative products for mass consumption. Therefore, circular economy, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability are the triadic concepts which evolve as social entrepreneurship by integrating frugal innovation and trendy designs that enhance social value and lifestyle. Social entrepreneurship with circular concepts in production and marketing encourages the recycling of products within the business process and cocreates social value chain to achieve sustainable goals. The long-standing social awareness and entrepreneurial philosophy to optimize the resources by use and reuse influence continuous improvement in the product designs to generate social consciousness through a linear path establishing take, make, and dispose circularity in sustainable production and consumption (Rajagopal, 2021). In nurturing the circular entrepreneurship, both consumers and society play a significant role in generating awareness and developing hierarchical consumption behavior by prioritizing the perceived use values of products of circular entrepreneurship. Therefore, blending entrepreneurship with circular philosophy and consumption values needs to increase the scope of products and services sharing, leasing, pay-per-service offers, and developing the notion of common ownership, which connects multimodel mobility systems (Eisenreich et al., 2022). However, inculcating such consumption patterns is a complex process and induced by the value chain and socio-economic and cultural paradigms besides the encouragement of market trends towards sharing and ownership philosophies. Sustainable entrepreneurship through the philosophy of circular economy evolves around 4C factors comprising cost, cyclicality, consciousness, and consumption. These factors need to be endorsed not only by the entrepreneurs, but also by the supply chain system in the market. In sustainable social enterprises, entrepreneurs also get opportunities to remanufacture and redesign the second-generation products

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with value additions and cost effectiveness for consumption of categorical products. Marketing of second- and further-generation products, which are manufactured out of the residual resources, is a complex process in the context of developing optimal pricing, branding, segmentation, targeting, and positioning. The designer recycled products can be segmented and positioned in both upstream and downstream markets for the premium and mass consumers within high-end and low-end price brackets. The recycled plastic furniture made out of shredding recycled plastic flakes are positioned in the upstream markets as a designer furniture, which add to both the social and economic values encompassing the social consciousness and sustainability. Therefore, social entrepreneurship with the philosophy of circular economy and sustainability can be defined as an evolving entrepreneurial system, which supports both business-to-consumer and business-to-business segments with restorative or regenerative designs at reasonably lower costs of production. The circular entrepreneurship has multilayered solutions from close- to openloop designing to create bio-economic material cycles to support organic growth in agricultural sector. For example, the production of sustainable energy using excreta of farm animals supports the requirement for the domestic power consumption of farmers (Govindan & Hasanagic, 2018). Building entrepreneurship on the concepts of circular economy and sustainability needs creative designing through collective intelligence to position restorative products by using natural resources as efficiently as possible, and add value to the consumption of products. The social entrepreneurship with sustainability features should have access to preserved and enhanced natural resources with the continuous flow to help continuous recycling of products, components, and materials using innovative market-oriented designs. However, there is a major challenge towards ice breaking of consumer psychology about recycled products, promoting their prolonged use, and eliminating negative externalities. The circular supply chain is often criticized for restrictive, narrow, and slow functionality to decelerate the resource loops and production. Most enterprises based on circular philosophy face challenges in material sourcing, designing, low-cost innovation, continuous manufacturing, distribution, sales, and consumption. In addition, the collection and classification of disposable products to serve as a material loop for recycling often breaks the circular supply chain (Geissdoerfer et al., 2018). The design entrepreneurship in the fashion industry is largely based on the concept of circular economy and sustainability, which thrives in a

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competitive environment with innovative business models to develop new consumption trends in the upstream markets. The existing trends emerging out of circular economy such as fair trade, shared economy, and lowsumerism supports the entrepreneurial products of second generation developed out of the consumption and industrial residuals. Lowsumerism is a social movement that generates consciousness about reducing the excessive consumption and unethical spending. It is a conscious switch from constantly buying, upgrading, and hoarding products to consume less. This new concept encourages fixing upside link and swapping products such as clothes, furniture, and appliances to drive conscious consumption (Todeschini et al., 2017). As there is a growing consciousness about lowsumerism, consumers have switched their behavior from buying new products to recycled and greed products. Consequently, large-scale retailers such as H&M and Zara have invested significantly in sustainable actions in manufacturing their designer products (Fletcher, 2010).

Circular Business Modeling Circular entrepreneurship revolves around the grid of quadruple elements comprising the cost of new product development, cyclicality propositions, competitive advantage, and consumption behavior. One of the major challenges with circular entrepreneurship is to explore business opportunities and develop a pro-market product to attract consumers towards experimenting them and inculcating perceived value. Such opportunities are widely latent, and it is difficult to surface them to develop secondgeneration products out of the industrial wastes and generate sustainable values at lower cost among the different segments of consumers. Accordingly, entrepreneurs engaged in manufacturing circular products face challenges in developing optimal pricing strategies, branding, segmentation, and attractive positioning of products. Consequently, the designthinking process to develop circular products often faces problems with market-oriented business modeling and developing appropriate marketing decisions irrespective of the quality of innovation with eco labels (Wagner, 2017). Business modeling for the products of circular entrepreneurship is largely governed by the availability of natural resources, balanced flow of renewable energy, predetermined consumer behavior, prolonged use value of recycled products, growing market demand, social consciousness, aesthetic value for sustainable products, and awareness about the

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conscious consumption. The perceived value on sustainable products is largely driven by consumer communities and collective intelligence, which diffuse knowledge on socio-economic value perceptions and technologies. Accordingly, marketing strategies for recycled products emerge out of complex grids, which require enormous support from consumer trust and non-conventional supply chain that endorses the radical business models for sustainable products. Most enterprises engaged in developing products within the framework of circular economy invest substantial time and resources in developing the concept map of the products through crowdsourcing and collective intelligence. The circular business model canvas can be divided into backstage and frontstage comprising various elements from the concept development to generation of alternative revenue streams. The principal backstage elements of the canvass consist of concept development, design thinking, industry attractiveness, market research, cost structure, and revenue streams. On the other hand, the frontstage of business model is contextual to core elements comprising organizational design, key partners, key activities, key resources, market channels, sales potential, customer relations, and value proposition in implementing the business model efficiently. These resources help in generating new ideas and transforming ideas into the manufacturing design by analyzing the designthinking process. Accordingly, these enterprises set goals of new product development, commercialization, and mass production by moderating values in both upstream and downstream markets. In this process, the major challenge faced by the circular enterprises is understanding the consumer values, social needs, and probable solutions that could encourage the consumer behavior and establish consumption behavior of circular products. Integrating the design thinking and concept development process, circular products can improve the product attractiveness in congruence with the lifecycle and value spread of the product. In the design-thinking process, successful circular enterprises tend to co-create and co-evolve the circular products by estimating the optimal cost, time, and risk factors within the scope of predetermined project charter. As the demand for sustainable products is increasing continuously in both developing and developed economies, the firms need to evaluate the industry attractiveness by measuring the possibilities of new entrants, substitution effect, consumer attitudes and supplier negotiations to develop sustainable business model. In addition, the market research on PESTEL factors and consumer behavior would complement to the

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decision of marketing sustainable products and exploring new opportunities within the existing competitive system. Business model can be successfully implemented with the appropriate organizational design based on the stakeholder engagement, corporate philosophy, social leadership, and global concerns towards sustainable products. The organizational design combined with customer-centric business model boosts value propositions of consumers and society, which could be maintained through customer relationship management through continuous education, contemporary solutions, and servitization. The effective customer relationship management helps in promoting direct and canalized sales of circular products within the consumer communities. In addition, the public policies and government support also help in developing consumer attraction towards business-to-business and business-to-consumer segments. The circular products can be canalized through conventional and digital channels with the extended outreach in upstream and downstream markets. However, the firms engaged in manufacturing and marketing circular products have a major concern of managing key partners comprising stakeholders, suppliers, and innovators and motivate them towards continuous ideation, innovation, and protype developments for continuous testing in markets to support the manufacturing process. Institutional finance and crowdfunding within the local regulations are the key resources for circular enterprises. The major load on the cost structure is observed in these firms towards manufacturing and marketing operations. As the circular enterprises are founded on lowcost philosophy, these firms do not participate actively in corporate social responsibility and generation of a discrete value stream. The alternate revenue streams for such firms are largely through indirect marketing. However, the circular enterprises have future growth perspectives which is expanding along with the social consciousness towards the consumption of sustainable products. Recycling and customization of products have shown growing attraction in sustainable business trends with the induction of new technologies like additive manufacturing for sustainable production (Schröder et al., 2015). The business models related to circular products can be classified in the context of cost, time, and lifecycle. The short cycle business models of sustainable products are characterized with high cost and risk. However, the recycled fashion products may be an exemption to such attributes as these products fetch high market share with effective social campaign and celebrity endorsements.

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Consumer durable products such as non-compression refrigerators, bioenergy products, and sustainable water filters like Tata Swatch, which has been developed using rice husk ash with embedded activated silica and carbon are some examples of long-cycle business models. Cascading business models are built around the frequent generation shifts on a principal product within short span. Such business models incur high risk as the longevity of the products in the market is jeopardized by technological variants, use value, and the end user price (Bocken et al., 2016). In developing market-oriented business models, entrepreneurs need to focus on market research to analyze the contemporary trends in circular products and consumption behavior within the changing market environment driven by the PESTEL factors. Accordingly, market research appropriate to circular products and services would help in designing a right business model to explore the potential and deliver the products and services to the predetermined customer segments. As the firms are sensitive to the cost-time-risk factors, the cost structure in this context significantly influences manufacturing, marketing, human resources, and financial overheads in implementing the business model in both upstream and downstream markets. Sustainability and innovations constitute a major share in developing circular business models by encouraging stakeholder contributions in eco-innovations such as collective renewable energy project of Urjagram (energy village) in India; Mississippi experiment of artificial pine generation; and green living projects on architecture, energy, and water efficiency in Spain. These projects were successfully implemented as community projects by customer engagement and stakeholder collaborations. These projects are implemented in the target areas in combination with effective public relations campaign to generate consumer awareness and adaptability (Porter & Kramer, 2006). It is necessary for the companies to develop sustainable innovation ecosystems to carry out business operations in target markets by reducing the risk and increasing the customer value. The random innovations are characterized with high risk due to unfamiliar use values, market uncertainties, and developing alliance with stakeholder and external innovators to develop a sustainable value chain. The sustainable innovations often fail due to unrealistic expectations, environmental contingencies, and uncertain consumer preferences (Adner, 2006). Therefore, sustainable enterprises tend to grow slowly in emerging markets as they are initially confined to the niche market due to the focus on low-cost to support affordability and adaptability of consumers. However, firms with strategic

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goals in commercializing innovations invest on long-term resources by engaging customers and stakeholders in co-creation and establishing differentiators and leverages in innovative products. Consequently, the strategic partnerships with large companies help sustainable enterprises at the grassroots to cater to customer-led innovations within the competitive marketplace. Such innovations can be spread across geo-demographic segments and promote vertical innovation across the generations over time. These firms are strongly recommended to encourage stakeholder participation from both internal (enterprise domain) and external (social domain) perspectives, and develop strong leadership in congruence with political ideology and social needs to support the entrepreneurial journey from ideation to innovation and markets to value. Consequently, sustainability-led enterprises grow laterally by diffusing knowledge and sharing values over the circular philosophy and entrepreneurship. The low-cost utilitarian enterprises within the sustainability segments engage in recycling industrial waste and product residuals to extend the product generations and lifecycles. The start-up enterprises adapt to low-cost sustainable product development activities such as throwaway packaging material for various ready-to-use products including food items. Such sustainable commercial innovation ideas focus on green consumption, while social innovation with sustainable strategies span across various consumer durable products including low-cost housing made out of used PET bottles. Nonetheless, the elements of business canvas remain the same as discussed above in developing business models to generate social impact, values, and well-being across various sectors of social and economic development (Rajagopal, 2021).

Environmental Mining Entrepreneurship engaged in environmental mining has wide opportunities to develop innovative products from natural resources and replenish the natural resources to build social well-being and market attractiveness. The timber-based enterprises at the grassroots face major challenges in developing commercial products using natural timber and replenishing the natural resources. Consequently, the social enterprises manufacturing commercial products with natural resources are encouraged to engage in afforestation and silviculture. The sustainability philosophy of IKEA in Europe is congruent with the philosophy of replenishing natural resources

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as the company adhere to the corporate policy of planting ten trees against the use of one tree in the predetermined silviculture area. In the context of consumption of natural resource products, the developing economies have also developed social consciousness among consumers to enjoy the product and take care of the natural resources simultaneously. The live pine trees (used for Christmas decoration) are leased in big pots to the customers with the condition to return the tree in healthy conditions after enjoying the festive decorations. Accordingly, the leasing company provides agronomical tools and inputs to the customers for taking care of the tree during the lease period. The consumers get the price drawback in proportion to the agronomical condition of the tree at the time of return. Environmental mining companies also explore the biogenic silica nanoparticle from agro waste to develop sustainable products and restore environmental sustainability. A variety of agricultural waste are used for the synthesis of silica nanoparticles, which are used in numerous fields including biomedicines and developing remedies for environmental degeneration. Such entrepreneurial tasks lead to green technologies in which numerous low-cost and renewable materials are integrated to process the agricultural waste. Such environmental mining enterprises find abundance of silica in diverse agricultural residues to explore new possibilities for agro waste management and valorization using silica nanoparticles. The planned disposal of agro waste helps in controlling greenhouse gasses, climate change, and harmful effects on biomass. Utilization of agricultural waste to transform value added products has emerged as one of the profit-oriented business, which helps in providing sustainable products to consumers, disposing agricultural wastes, and conserving the ecological resources (Yadav et al., 2022). In agriculture-based economies, an abundance of agro waste such as paddy husk, coconut husk, fruit peels, fruit seeds, corn cob, and rice bran is generated during the production of agricultural products and their primary processing. These can be successfully synthesized into nano material by harnessing silica, copper, and carbon-based nano particles. Silica is a common and pervasive component in agricultural production, crop management, and plantations, which has various catalytic functions in crop protection. The nano particles of silica and carbon can be used in biomedicine and industrial products such as anti-corrosion agents and manufacturing of ceramics (Mughal et al., 2021). The silica and carbon nano particles extracted from rice husk are used to filter still water sources. Therefore, environmental mining in farm sector not only contributes to the sustainability goals of the society,

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Fig. 5.1 Environmental mining and entrepreneurial ecosystem (Source Author)

but also enhances the business opportunities in the industrial segment. The attributes of environmental mining and entrepreneurial ecosystem supporting industrial marketing opportunities have been illustrated in Fig. 5.1. The sustainable entrepreneurship in farm and non-farm sector is associated with business-to-business marketing segment through continuous innovation in technological applications as exhibited in the Fig. 5.1. The public policies in both developed and developing countries support sustainable entrepreneurship with a focus on environmental mining and encourage low-cost innovation for social and industrial applications. In this segment, the entrepreneurial governance is managed by social institutions or public–private partnership arrangements to cater to financial flows and technological skills. Accordingly, the sustainable entrepreneurship evolves around natural resource management through continuous innovation and technology. In this process, the business opportunities combined with low-cost innovations lead to a successful commercialization and promote social well-being within the changing market ecosystem. However, environmental mining is carried out by micro, small, and medium enterprises at niche level with the support of public policies. Market competition with large enterprises is a major challenge to these firms. Consequently, the market attractiveness in the sustainable product segment through environmental mining has emerged as a hazy vision for local companies. Among various applications of sustainable products through environmental mining, the green industrial products such as the development of sustainable tyres with silica-based technology has emerged

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as a growing interest among industries. Similarly, the rice husk ash has caught the attention of innovators for developing consumer products such as still water filters. Tata Industries in India has used active carbon and silica with rice husk ash to develop a still water filter as a low-cost sustainable product for rural and semi-urban consumers. Sustainability-oriented companies like IKEA are engaged in replenishing natural resources to avoid their depletion. The social consciousness and global concerns encourage firms to use timber products by developing effective silviculture plan to ensure plantation of high proportion of trees. The social consciousness towards smaller consumption of live trees and timber products also motivates the forest-based enterprises to ensure sustainable plantation and advise consumers to avoid erosion of trees. The growing consciousness among consumers in use of live pine trees has been discussed in the pre-text. Similarly, the government and public–private partnership projects are increasingly focusing on creating entrepreneurship towards managing agricultural waste and generating biogenic silica, which can be used as an active agent in various nano biotechnology applications and biomedicines. In addition, biogenic silica also helps in controlling greenhouse effects through low-cost, subsidized technologies in developing countries (Chundawat et al., 2022). Permaculture has also emerged as a sustainable methodology for urban land use patterns in developing sustainable gardens and marketing of eco-friendly horticultural products (Jelinek, 2017). The sustainable entrepreneurship has also attracted the conceptualization of biomimicry projects by studying the formation and effects of nature to manufacture products of industrial and personal use. In this context, the incrustation of spider web design into industrial glass to protect the bird collisions and death is an example of implementation of biomimicry in entrepreneurial ventures. It has been observed by entrepreneurs engaged in sustainability in nature that spider webs repel birds’ way-through and guide them to divert their flying path. Arnold Glass, a German engineering company has ingeniously reproduced the silk webs into the production of special bird safe glass, which is commercially identified as Ornilux. This innovative product has a unique and invisible embedded attribute that allows birds to see obstacles and avoid collision (Ferrer et al., 2020). Like spiderweb inspirations, biomimicry-based technology has also extended the industrial production of water repellant surfaces based on the trees with water repellent leaves in rainforests and plants in marshy land. Inspired by the fireflies and Saharan silver ant, DE light solution emulates nano structures that

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efficiently transmit light, reduces glare, and incorporates cooling mechanism by restricting the emission of light above 63º of angle by using total internal reflection. This biomimicry-based device has become and effective solution for the streetlights, which ensure low light pollution and health hazards by emitting indirect lighting source.

Enviropreneurial Entrepreneurship Environmental concerns in entrepreneurship have gained the attention in social and public policies following the United Nations classification of sustainability functions. The sustainable social development has significantly encouraged the enviropreneurial entrepreneurship as it expanded into various sectors including energy, housing, transportation, and education for all in the developing economies. The energy enterprises in these economies have significantly influenced the demand for renewable energy and supported the environmental movement within communities. Consequently, the landscape of environmentally conscious marketplace has been reshaped and expanded geodemographically through individual enterprises, public sector undertakings, and public–private-partnerships. Such expansion has influenced corporate strategies to encompass enviropreneurial marketing strategies with a focus on social performance goals, corporate entrepreneurship, sustainability-led enterprise orientation, and enviropreneurial business models. Enviropreneurial enterprises are encouraged at the grassroots under the public policies in developing economies, which significantly influence investors for social investing, which involves building integrated social values in collaboration with environmental accountability and the contemporary business practices. As the consumer consciousness towards sustainable products is increasing continuously, the energy enterprises have found wide opportunities for expanding their business into renewable energy sources like solar and biomass energy. The local regulations and global concerns monitor the environmental enterprises and provide organizational support for enviropreneurial marketing through organizational networks (Menon & Menon, 1997). The enviropreneurial orientation among the micro, small, and medium enterprises in developing economies is largely focused on the context of the emerging PNS factors, crowdfunding, collective intelligence, and public policies convergent to political ideologies. The total effect of governmental and global concerns towards sustainable entrepreneurship

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has been supported by organized marketing services of entrepreneurial products through green marketing mix strategy, which primarily focuses on providing consumer education to stimulate consumption. The subsidized eco-labeling strategies for enviropreneurial enterprises at the grassroots have significantly helped to increase the consumer confidence about the consumption of sustainable products and services. Consequently, the green marketing has caught increasing social interest and encouraged entrepreneurs to develop capabilities and harness their resources for the development of sustainable products. There has been much research supporting inclusivity in entrepreneurship and resource management from the point of view of developing dynamic capabilities within the broad framework of natural resource-based production (Khan et al., 2020). The renewable energy enterprises in developing economies are encouraged by the social and government institutions. However, the low generation and distribution of renewable energy indicates the lack of diffusion and adaptability of green technology causing a major gap in production and consumption. In addition, the socio-economic complexities concerning social needs, energy competition, and energy prices and regulation have discouraged energy enterprises in securing licenses to start production and distribution operations. Consequently, the gap between expected renewable energy production and distribution appears to be wide as compared to the conventional energy grid management. The business model for green energy needs to be based on mapping of available resources, such as solar, fossil, and wind energy generation sources. The green energy technologies and business modeling need to be focused on reference to cost-time-risk and cost–benefit–profit matrix to determine appropriate energy pricing and promotional strategies. Simultaneously, these enterprises need to focus on encouraging consumer education, conducing social evaluation, and improving economic values for enviropreneurial products and services (Rajagopal, 2021). The sustainable housing enterprises are engaged in providing ecofriendly housing structures with polyethylene (PET) plastic bottles in many developing countries including Nigeria and India. The PET-based housing construction is structurally and thermally stable for utilization as building units for replacing traditional concrete blocks. The construction of such sustainable houses is cost effective and socially acceptable. The PET bottles are filled with either dry or moist sand bound by cement mortar to produce stable masonry walls to enhance the thermostatic properties. This bottle brick technology started in early twenty-first century

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in Africa, India, and South and Central America to provide cost effective and environment friendly alternative to conventional building bricks (Mansour & Ali, 2015). Using PET as recycled material, sustainable enterprises are engaged in developing construction projects in semi-urban and rural areas and educating local communities about the recycling of PET bottles and its associated benefits. By connecting the construction projects to the local communities and collaborating with them in collecting plastic bottles and waste plastic material for the construction project helps in enhancing their awareness about sustainability and environmentally friendly habitats (Limami et al., 2020). Such projects have also been initiated in Cambodia, which uses local volunteers in collecting plastic waste and producing eco block of plastic bottles to replace the conventional building bricks. These bottles filled with dry or moist sand and plastic waste are used as a filler in the wall, which improves the surrounding environment and serves as cost-effective building. The social institutions help in developing material cycle loop by transforming the plastic waste and used PET bottles into a construction materials resource for eco-friendly housing. However, this has become one of the major challenges in managing solid waste in most developing countries, though utilizing plastic bottles in construction has emerged as an architecturally innovative sustainable construction approach (Braungart & McDonough, 2002).

Case Studies Green Wood Social Products Building sustainable social products with timber has been increasingly attracting social and industrial concerns by ensuring the use of timber with adequate replenishing of the timber resources. Social enterprises develop alliances with commercial enterprises in building sustainable social capital using timber not only because of its natural availability and glamorous look, but also because growing trees is essential for CO2 balance and for encouraging low energy and good thermal properties in use. The sustainability of timber-oriented social capital can be observed in eco-friendly educational institutions in the rural and semi-urban areas, which provide good ergonomics and thermal properties for the students in the school (Mori et al., 2017). The timber-based constructions like schools significantly motivate industries and the society to participate in silviculture

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processes and encourage sustainable plantation. The forestry practices contribute significantly to reduce greenhouse emissions by constructing community workplaces, pooling fuel resources, and by using timber as a substitute for energy intensive material such as concrete and steel. Many companies in developing countries like Green Ply Industrial Limited in India, which is engaged in plywood production with sustainability goals to provide community construction in rural, semi-urban, and smart cities in India. The timber constructions are increasingly recognized for low embodied energy, natural renewability, and recyclability. Low-cost educational buildings are constructed with natural materials including timber with aesthetic values inside and out, which allows the students to learn about sustainability while enjoying the place of education. Such constructions are supported by green landscapes, and the architecture supports the rainwater harvest for non-drinking water requirement. The use of timber beams enables continuous structural support in both exterior and interior ergonomics with thermal insulations in roofs and walls with photovoltaic renewable energy. In cold climates, the biomass boiler and automated natural ventilation system helps in reducing the conventional energy consumption approximately to the half of its estimated potential, which lowers the total operational cost of the school and enables to use the savings on recruiting more human resources (Teachers). The timber companies provide sustainable classroom furniture in the schools, which is encouraged by the social institutions and government. Consequently, the demand for sustainable furniture industry in the business-to-business segment is gradually transforming from unorganized to organized business model. Such transition is continuously increasing the need for sustainable timber products and appreciating the commercial value of the property. The increasing urbanization, and demand for low-cost housing and furniture’s have further encouraged the sustainable timber products like value added MDF products to provide both value and cost advantages. In view of the growing advantages of sustainable low-cost housing, the demand for the construction of timber-based sustainable buildings has increased to urban areas and large organizations like universities. Aurecon construction company from Australia has developed the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore through innovative construction methods like renewable forests and prefabricated material for on-site assembly. The company has built six-floor academic building of NTU using mass engineered timber

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(MET). The sustainable timber used in the construction has a combination of cross-laminated timber for the slabs of the building and glued laminated timber for beams and columns. Use of sustainable timber with assured silviculture support by replenishing trees is one of the fundamental requirements of bio-economics and developing the ecological balance between the consumption and generation of natural resources. Disruption of these ecosystems lead to serious consequences both at micro and macro levels. However, the impacts vary by the affected forest types and the respective land use and silviculture management practices (Sing et al., 2018). The increasing energy and environmental crisis, and local regulations on the use of timber within the sustainability norms have significantly replaced the use of conventional material with sustainable construction resources. The outstanding properties of timber such as availability, cost, cyclic ability, reusability, and natural renewability has significantly encouraged its usage in low-cost architecture in rural and semi-urban areas. The advantage of timber in architecture has been technically high in view of the strength-to-weight ratio, acoustics, and thermal insulation properties (Wimmers, 2017). Consequently, timber has been used in structural components as beams, columns, and flooring systems alongside non-structural components such as windows, door frames, and insulating envelops in both low-cost and luxury constructions. Therefore, timber has been considered as a sustainable resource, which is cost-effective as compared to the steel and concrete. In addition, the use of timber is also encouraged by the users and builders due to increasing social consciousness about sustainable materials and, social values and lifestyle (Bazli et al., 2022). Biomass Energy Entrepreneurship The increasing technological advances in using agricultural and food waste, and animal and organic waste have encouraged biomass energy entrepreneurship by installing and managing biodigesters of various sizes suitable for small family use, and large-scale industrial production that generates large volumes of biogas for domestic and industrial use. The biomass energy entrepreneurship has emerged as a social enterprise, which added benefits to manage agricultural waste and develop high grade organic fertilizer to increase the agricultural productivity. There

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are different business models for biogas production which include localized use, power generation, and contribution to the power grid. The operational models of biodigesters have been derived in various destinations based on the functional prototype of Canadian, Indian, and Chinese models, which are successful in small-scale business. The blueprint of these models includes floating drum and fixed dome models. More and more communities are encouraged to invest in greener technologies to provide cost effective and easy to use solution in waste management in production of low-cost localized energy. The developed countries like Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and United States have also found the use of biodigesters suitable as an eco-friendly and climate protective technology for generation of domestic power. The biomass energy enterprises use sustainable methods of recycling biodegradable waste to produce low-cost energy, which leads to waste minimization at the same time. Consequently, such enterprises are funded under social and public policy programs to establish treatment plants for producing biofield and connect to regional electricity grid to provide additional energy besides the domestic use. In view of the social and sustainability-based benefits, the implementation of biomass energy projects have substantially increased in Europe. In developing countries like India, the rural energy consumption is continuously increasing, which demands higher supply of localized energy for cooking, lighting, and small-scale industries (Mustafa et al., 2016). Therefore, the biogas potential has high business prospects. According to the government estimates on livestock population and the collection of animal waste, it can be assumed that there are approximately 300 million cattle, buffalo, and young stock. Of which, the approximate daily collectable biowaste during the night is approximately 8kgs per head leading to the annual production of animal biowaste would be over 600 MT wet weight or 115.1 MT dry weight, which leads to over 900 trillion kilo calories of gas for domestic consumption. The government organizations like Khadi and Village Industries Commission and Self-help groups have several funding programs under biomass energy production programs (Bedana et al., 2022).

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References Adner, R. (2006). Match your innovation strategy to your innovation ecosystem. Harvard Business Review, 83(4), 98–116. Bazli, M., Heitzmann, M., & Ashrafi, H. (2022). Long-span timber flooring systems: A systematic review from structural performance and design considerations to constructability and sustainability aspects. Journal of Building Engineering, 48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2021.103981 Bedana, D., Kamruzzaman, M., Rana, M. J., Mustafi, B. A. A., & Talukder, R. K. (2022). Financial and functionality analysis of a biogas plant in Bangladesh. Heliyon, 8(9). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e10727 Bocken, N. M. P., de Pauw, I., Bakker, C., & van der Grinten, B. (2016). Product design and business model strategies for a circular economy. Journal of Industrial Production Engineering, 33(3), 308–320. Braungart, M., & McDonough, W. (2002). Cradle to cradle: Remaking the way we make things. North Point Press. Chundawat, N. S., Parmar, B. S., Deuri, A. S., Vaidya, D., Jadoun, S., Zarrintaj, P., Barani, M., & Chauhan, N. P. S. (2022). Rice husk silica as a sustainable filler in the tire industry. Arabian Journal of Chemistry, 15(9). https://doi. org/10.1016/j.arabjc.2022.104086 Eisenreich, A., Füller, J., Stuchtey, M., & Gimenez-Jimenez, D. (2022). Toward a circular value chain: Impact of the circular economy on a company’s value chain processes. Journal of Cleaner Production. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jclepro.2022.134375 Ferrer, M., Morandini, V., Baumbusch, R., Muriel, R., De Lucas, M., & Calabuig, C. (2020). Efficacy of different types of “bird flight diverter” in reducing bird mortality due to collision with transmission power lines. Global Ecology and Conservation, 23, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2020. e01130 Fletcher, K. (2010). Slow fashion: An invitation for systems change. The Journal of Design, Creative Process, and the Fashion Industry, 2(2), 259–265. Geissdoerfer, M., Morioka, S. N., de Carvalho, M. M., & Evans, S. (2018). Business models and supply chains for the circular economy. Journal of Cleaner Production, 190, 712–721. Govindan, K., & Hasanagic, M. (2018). A systematic review on drivers, barriers, and practices towards circular economy: A supply chain perspective. International Journal of Production Resource, 56, 278–311. Jelinek, R. (2017). A permaculture primer: Using eco-theory to promote knowledge acquisition, dissemination and use in the sales organization. Industrial Marketing Management, 65, 206–216. Khan, E. A., Royhan, P., Rahman, M. A., Rahman, M. M., & Mostafa, A. (2020). The impact of enviropreneurial orientation on small firms’ business performance: The mediation of green marketing mix and eco-labeling strategies. Sustainability, 12(1), 221. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010221

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Limami, H., Manssouri, I., Cherkaoui, K., & Saadaoui, M. (2020). Thermal performance of unfired lightweight clay bricks with HDPE & PET waste plastics additives. Journal of Building Engineering, 30. https://doi.org/10. 1016/j.jobe.2020.101251 Mansour, A. M. H., & Ali, S. A. (2015). Reusing waste plastic bottles as an alternative sustainable building material. Energy for Sustainable Development, 24, 79–85. Menon, A., & Menon, A. (1997). Enviropreneurial marketing strategy: The emergence of corporate environmentalism as market strategy. Journal of Marketing, 61(1), 51–67. Mori, A. S., Lertzman, K. P., & Gustafsson, L. (2017). Biodiversity and ecosystem services in forest ecosystems: A research agenda for applied forest ecology. Journal of Applied Ecology, 54, 12–27. Mughal, B., Zaidi, S. Z. J., Zhang, X., & Hassan, S. U. (2021). Biogenic nanoparticles: Synthesis, characterisation and applications. Applied Sciences, 11(6), 2598. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11062598 Mustafa, M. Y., Calay, R. K., & Román, E. (2016). Biogas from organic waste— A case study. Procedia Engineering, 146, 310–317. Porter, M. E., & Kramer, M. R. (2006). The link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility. Harvard Business Review, 84(12), 78–92. Rajagopal. (2021). Sustainable businesses in developing economies—Socio-economic and governance perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan–Springer. Schröder, A., Falk, B., & Schmitt, R. (2015). Evaluation of cost structures of additive manufacturing processes using a new business model. Procedia CIRP, 30, 311–316. Sing, L., Metzger, M. J., Paterson, J. S., & Ray, D. (2018). A review of the effects of forest management intensity on ecosystem services for Northern European temperate forests with a focus on the UK. Forestry, 91, 151–164. Todeschini, B. V., Cortimiglia, M. N., Callegaro-de-Menezes, D., & Ghezzi, A. (2017). Innovative and sustainable business models in the fashion industry: Entrepreneurial drivers, opportunities, and challenges. Business Horizons, 60(6), 759–770. Wagner, T. P. (2017). Reducing single-use plastic shopping bags in the USA. Waste Management, 70(1), 3–12. Wimmers, G. (2017). Wood: A construction material for tall buildings. Nature Reviews Materials, 2(12), 1–2. Yadav, M., Dwibedi, V., Sharma, S., & George, N. (2022). Biogenic silica nanoparticles from agro-waste: Properties, mechanism of extraction and applications in environmental sustainability. Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, 10(6). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jece.2022.108550

CHAPTER 6

Business Modelling

Core Arguments on Entrepreneurial Business The journey of entrepreneurs engaged in cleaner production within the framework of sustainability goals pass through various stages of entrepreneurial process (Zaheer et al., 2022). These include social motivation derived from social consciousness and social responsibility, exploring opportunity, crowdsourcing and PNS factors, and acquiring resources through government, self-help groups, and community commons (Jefferson et al., 2017). In addition, entrepreneurs also learn from the existing market demand, business orientation, and consumer preferences to develop sustainable products and services. The enviropreneurial businesses are combined with social innovation, co-creation, sharing of workplace, social and business ecosystem, and concerns of the society on sustainability. These factors support the entrepreneurial dynamics in managing green production and services within the social and economic framework. Entrepreneurs largely function within the social and cultural contexts that help in recognizing market-oriented opportunity. However, they face a wide gap among social development goals, business expectations, and self-conceived barriers towards cleaner entrepreneurship owing to the social values. During these stages, the major challenge faced by entrepreneurs is towards acquiring capital resources under government programs, corporate funding, and crowdfunding. Most © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9_6

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entrepreneurs refrain from using personal funding, and are less influenced by the external resource environment (Sullivan & Meek, 2012). The entrepreneurial process among social entrepreneurs engaged in cleaner production in emerging markets is non-linear and complex due to the issues associated with knowledge and skills in managing cleaner products and services to create social and industrial values. However, entrepreneurs explore more creative and constructive opportunities over conventional and linear entrepreneurial patterns. Such behavior has been confirmed through various studies explaining effectuation theory, which focuses on social ventures built within subsistence economy (Nahi, 2016). Social environment and cultural context play significant roles in exploring and recognizing opportunities among entrepreneurs. However, self-perception and personal ambitions often raise self-conceived barriers towards entrepreneurial performance within the social environment. Inadequate knowledge and skills in manufacturing and marketing of cleaner products significantly stimulates entrepreneurial to acquire adequate resources for managing enterprises at the initial stage, and scaling of business in the later stages (Katre, 2018). The social and economic constraints of entrepreneurs affect their innovation-, entrepreneurial-, and marketing skills. Entrepreneurial education in women is lower than men, which causes relatively lower self-esteem, lower social status, and lower cultural sensitivity in women, affecting the empowerment of women in entrepreneurial activities in developing economies (Goyal & Yadav, 2014). In addition, regional networks and public policies play a significant role in nurturing social entrepreneurship in emerging markets, as these factors facilitate access to capital, infrastructure, human resources, and connectivity to markets. Some studies have argued that social entrepreneurs contribute to the sustainable development of the society and improve the socio-economic conditions and quality of life of stakeholders. Greener entrepreneurship in emerging economies is increasingly contributing to shifting the socio-economic values within regions by establishing innovative practices. A comparison of regional entrepreneurial ecosystems illustrates the commonalities and variations among the social and sustainable enterprises at the grassroots. Accordingly, exploring and analyzing the impact of women entrepreneurship on the various elements of ecosystem justifies the global movement on cleaner production by protecting natural resources. The sustainable entrepreneurial practices within the changing socio-economic trends in emerging markets are largely supported by the crowd-based business

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models through social media and relationship marketing, which also attract business-to-business market segment (Selden & Fletcher, 2015). In South Asia, the specific power relations associated with gender influence the entrepreneurial opportunities which are culturally sensitive and hold low level of economic growth. However, the support of public policies tends to empower women entrepreneurs through goal-oriented key programs on improving the quality of life (Kantor, 2002). Some studies have identified environmental barriers comprising socio-cultural, economic, political, legal, and technological complexities among women entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa. These entrepreneurs face negative social belief, low-entrepreneurial attitudes, and oppressive behavior. Such psycho-social attributes demotivate entrepreneurial process to undertake cleaner production operations on the commercial scale (Amine & Staub, 2009). Entrepreneurs engaged in sustainable production in India perceive that social empowerment is the key to manage the enterprises successfully. The socio-cultural constraints experienced by these entrepreneurs in the business-to-business segment include ambidextrous recognitions among society and stakeholders to carry out independent innovations and commercialization of entrepreneurial activities. The entrepreneurial cooperatives in India led by social and public-sector organizations like self-employed women’s association (SEWA), Thribhuvandas Foundation, and Council for Advancement of People’s Action and Rural technology (CAPART) have been successful, as they adapted to integrated social and economic measures to implement the entrepreneurial business model. Accordingly, entrepreneurs play an important role in creating social capital through co-creation and expansion of cleaner production. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and World Bank have played motivating roles in local governments of Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) to develop public policies to encourage cleaner production and sustainable entrepreneurship. There are various routes for entrepreneurs to develop business models and market their products in upstream and downstream markets as observed in the developed and developing economies (Sehnem et al., 2019). The common entrepreneurial path in manufacturing and marketing, as observed in developing economies, is illustrated in Fig. 6.1. The micro, small and medium enterprises are spread across various farm and non-farm industries with varied perspectives of the entrepreneurial journey, which can be measured among various milestones, in developing countries. The entrepreneurial journey,

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Government Structure Public policies Local government Self-help group Community commons Public-private partnership

Resources Management Public funding Government program Crowdfunding Partnership investment • Entrepreneurship grants

• • • •

Business modelling • Social marketing • Crowd-based strategies • Collective approaches • Cooperatives

• • • • •

• • • •

Social Entrepreneurship Social consciousness Cleaner entrepreneurship Sustainable practices Gender and equity Socio-cultural motivation

Reinforcement • Innovation • Technology • Competencies

Entrepreneurial Journey Social motivation Social responsibility Business opportunity Crowdsourcing PNS factors Entrepreneurial education

Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises

• • • • • •

Entrepreneurial Workspace Social innovation Co-creation Community infrastructure Agile workplace

• • • • •

MARKET

• • • • • •

Entrepreneurial Operations Venture management Marketing approaches Decision making Leadership Niche marketing Reverse accountability

Logical Framework of Entrepreneurial Business Path

Fig. 6.1 Logical framework of entrepreneurial business (Source Author)

entrepreneurial workspace, and social entrepreneurship constitute the growth perspectives in manufacturing and market outreach. These stages are considered as vertical dimensions of entrepreneurship, which are supported by the entrepreneurial foundation including many vital domains such as government structure, resource management, business modeling, and operational linkages. In a holistic view, the vertical dimensions and the supporting domains are reinforced by continuous innovation, technology acceptance, and building entrepreneurial competencies (Ratinho et al., 2015). The synergy of the dimensions and domains forms the logical framework for entrepreneurial business as exhibited in Fig. 6.1. The social motivation is one of the core elements that prompt entrepreneurial journey by blending social responsibilities and doing business by exploring appropriate opportunities based on PNS factors. The entrepreneurial education has been identified as the critical stimulator in the entrepreneurial journey, which is largely driven by crowdsourcing new ideas and analyzing the collective intelligence (Welter et al., 2017). The entrepreneurial journey is driven by social innovation, which engages stakeholders to cocreate innovative products by using the community infrastructure in the initial entrepreneurial stages. Consequently, the concept of agile workplace is embedded in progressive entrepreneurial workspaces in developing countries, which are supported by the social institutions and key partners. The entrepreneurial workplace

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ergonomics motivate social entrepreneurship, which is largely derived from social consciousness to produce cleaner products and services and adapt to globally established sustainable practices within socio-cultural ecosystem, gender, and equity-based philosophies. The long-haul journey of social entrepreneurship is supported by infrastructure provided under public policies, local government initiatives, self-help groups, community commons, and public–private partnership (Kallinikos et al., 2013). In connecting entrepreneurs to production and marketing activities, the critical domain is to manage resources acquired through public funding, government programs, crowdfunding (social projects), partnership investments (commercial funding), and entrepreneurship grants (sustainability projects). Entrepreneurs’ outreach to market is largely influenced by an effective business modeling congruent to the attributes of products and services. Most micro, small and medium enterprises engaged in manufacturing and marketing entrepreneurial products rely on social marketing tools including social media, which helps them reach out crowd and larger customer segments through collective approaches. However, entrepreneurial cooperatives and consortiums function with higher responsibilities than individual entrepreneurs in reaching out to new markets, customer segments, and business-to-business alliances. In entrepreneurial operations, the major challenge is venture management, which spreads across various activities starting from innovation, prototype architecture, concept testing, market testing, business case development, to conducting sales wave research to ensure mass production and commercialization. These stages require predominant marketing approaches, right decision-making, and reverse accountability by engaging stakeholders in operational processes. Nonetheless, leadership plays a critical role in driving entrepreneurial journey from a manufacturing workspace to consumers’ market (Ghezzi, 2019). A study carried out by World Bank and International Finance Corporation reveals that more than 40% of businesses registered in LAC region are owned by women entrepreneurs engaged in cleaner production. However, these entrepreneurs face credit gap, managerial dominance, and social security in operating their ventures. In developing economies, most enterprises seek financial resources through micro-credit institutions and from the earnings derived from non-farm businesses in the LAC region. The public policies in this region tend to aim at improving the quality of enterprises with focus on poverty reduction, micro enterprise credit, and

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the social norms that prescribe the conventional entrepreneurial opportunities. The public–private partnership on sustainable entrepreneurship projects is implemented by multinational companies like Nestlé (organic coffee farming, Colombia), Starbucks (coffee farming extension program, Mexico), and Cactus Power Mexico (Economic Empowerment for Rural Girls and Women, Mexico) are also helping local entrepreneurs to focus on co-created business models and restructure the organizational design to scale-up their business. However, various limitations have been identified among social enterprises on entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, and decision-making in the context of the changing market trends and technology. Most micro, small and medium enterprises in developing economies lack in three prominent dimensions, which include designto-market (branding and communication), organizational design (human capital and skills management), and technology acceptance (commercializing innovations and developing crowd-based business models). Consequently, entrepreneurs in developing economies face complexities in achieving competitive performance and market leadership (Maldonado & Martinez, 2012). Entrepreneurs engaged in sustainability activities in emerging economies are guided by public policies towards developing new perceptions, understanding entrepreneurial ecosystem, and consumer behavior. These entrepreneurs widely promote their businesses based on chronological experiences and through critical examination of lessons drawn on longitudinal entrepreneurial behavior (Murray et al., 2017). These enterprises commonly evolve from family business foundations (FBF) and social institutions, which are confined to niche markets. They tend to explore and expand their business by seeking new opportunities across industries, and seek public policy support on capital formation to adapt to new innovations and technological trends. However, sustainable enterprises emerging out of the FBFs lack the consistent knowledge base required to run their enterprises independently. These enterprises operate partially within the triadic knowledge base comprising acquired knowledge, interrelated knowledge, and self-perceived knowledge. Often, these enterprises fail to critically examine the business philosophies and benefit derived from the entrepreneurial perspectives to develop sustainable strategies. These enterprises initiate low-profile business in their early stages of growth producing confined values to primary stakeholders, beneficiaries, and customers. However, scaling of businesses among

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micro, sustainable entrepreneurs has always been a major socio-economic challenge (Lingelbach et al., 2015). In view of the changing dynamics of local market ecosystems in the global entrepreneurial arena, the role of social entrepreneurship has a direct impact on the growth perspectives in emerging markets. Therefore, it is necessary to project innovation and design thinking strategies across spatial and temporal dimensions to enhance the entrepreneurial structure, implement organic changes in business practices, and manage disruptions in local enterprises. The entrepreneurs in developing countries limit their capabilities towards experimentation, commitment, agility, and strategic alliances to mitigate risks and entrepreneurial uncertainties (Chandler et al., 2011). The sustainable entrepreneurship has evolved as a social business trade stimulated by the collective intelligence and growing social concerns related to various entrepreneurial perspectives at the grassroots, with focus on change management, public policies, corporate social responsibility, organized marketplace, and sustainability in entrepreneurship. The sustainable entrepreneurship engaged in manufacturing and marketing of cleaner products has been founded on the premise of frugal innovation and low-cost business modeling (Pizzi et al., 2021). As sustainable entrepreneurship is largely motivated and led by social governance discretely, the reverse accountability is embedded in the organizational design. Consequently, entrepreneurs engaged in sustainable manufacturing and marketing have an indirect control of society and public policies, though these guiding organizations encourage entrepreneurs in developing price-driven competitive business modeling (Lind et al., 2015). The theory of competitive entrepreneurship also endorses the role of society in transforming the entrepreneurial models, by adapting to the changing market dynamics and the increasing capabilities and competencies of innovation-based emerging enterprises (Dong, 2019). The entrepreneurs must also examine the market competitiveness and disruption through innovation to build upon the foundations of traditional entrepreneurial business models. As stated earlier, most micro, small and medium enterprises within the niche and bottom of the pyramid segments evolve from family business models within the socio-economic ecosystem (Veiga et al., 2020). Hence, the critical need for motivation is to be addressed through entrepreneurial and business factors that influence social enterprises. The business perspectives for social entrepreneurs are based on cognitive beliefs, intrinsic and extrinsic needs,

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demographic factors; and their ability to adapt to innovation and technology trends, explore new resources (capital and human resources), and develop sustainable organizational design. The business model theory for sustainable entrepreneurs can be integrated with hybrid perspectives comprising digitization, disruption, and diversification as the core strategy, which would help in bridging the gap between the branded (familiar) and unbranded (new and unfamiliar) products in the marketplace (Kraus et al., 2019). A competitive business modeling for social and sustainable entrepreneurial products would serve both socio-cultural, customer-centric, and business-to-business domains. The market-based entrepreneurial philosophy can be embedded within the social maxims and entrepreneurial roles in restructuring operational and organizational designs of sustainable enterprises can be encouraged across destinations (Ketprapakorn & Kantabutra, 2022). Such shifts in philosophy would help in measuring the performance of these enterprises in the ambidextrous context of business-to-consumers and business-to-business market segments besides establishing organizational alliances to improve entrepreneurial performance. Accordingly, effective marketing strategies can be derived by analyzing the causes and effects on changing scenarios of innovation, technology, and market disruptions to improve entrepreneurial performance, organizational design practices, and designto-market approach (Parrish, 2010).

Entrepreneurial Business Model Entrepreneurial business models at the grassroots have commonly emerged out of the family business or conventional wisdom, which face difficulties in adapting to the changing market requirements and are confined to the niche markets over time. The conventional business models include low-investment in technology and marketing strategies, as these business models have short-term goals and are based on marginal profit propositions unlike the contemporary business philosophy of strategic goals with value-based profiteering approach (Levillain & Segrestin, 2019). The local entrepreneurs are often hesitant to change their operational patterns suitable to large-scale marketing opportunities and value-added profiteering approach. Consequently, these entrepreneurs become less flexible to changing their operational pattern congruent to the new managerial practices and competitive business approaches. As the demand for socially sustainable products in both farm

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and non-farm sectors is increasing continuously, the competitive business models help entrepreneurial products to gain advantage in larger markets and derive profit in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business market segments. However, the transformation in business model takes time for the enterprises to adapt, as this process is affected by exogeneous factors to a large extent. To inculcate changes in the operational business models, entrepreneurs need to change their work culture in the organization, develop employee and stakeholder engagements, and inculcate willingness to adapt to new business dimensions by decentralizing decision-making process to improve the entrepreneurial performance (Trautwein, 2021). In a holistic approach to revive the business model, entrepreneurs need to develop inter-relationship between endogenous and exogeneous factors to gear-up the transformation process, as the business units increasingly ingrain the operational complexities by tasks and by nature of the industry. Broadly, business model can be explained as a transaction process including backward and forward linkages from manufacturing to marketing, and sales to value creation. Therefore, the entrepreneurial journey to the consumer markets needs a convergence of divergent factors encountered in the business trajectory. The shifts of entrepreneurial practices from conventional to contemporary business model need to be developed as a learning organization to leverage continuous learning to support each stage of the entrepreneurial business journey with specific types of innovation, which synchronizes interdependencies in the business process yielding to optimal set of performance matrix (Christensen et al., 2016). Chronological evaluation of transition in business modeling among social enterprises with respective transition effects across the stages is exhibited in Fig. 6.2. Architecting business model in the context of contemporary market ecosystem is evolved chronologically by identifying the transitional needs in the respective stages of business modeling to support entrepreneurial growth. The conventional business practices have several weaknesses in which the entrepreneurs have confined reasoning and vision for emergingout-of-family firms. Such enterprises have triadic constraints in business causing the low loop effect on resources, production, and profit. These firms are governed by family leadership, which have low motivation for innovation as these firms have shown resistance to change management. Consequently, they adapt to conventional technologies and operate in niche market. The major challenge for conventional entrepreneurial businesses is the centralized leadership and disengagement with customers and

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Change Management • Transformational leadership • Market orientation • Horizontal growth

Conventional Business Practices • Low resources, low production, low profit • Family-led leadership • Low motivation for innovation T1 • Lack oft echnology • Niche marketing • Disengagement with customers and stakeholders

People’s Approach • Crowd thinking • Collective intelligence • Bottom-up determinants

Non-conventional Business Practices • Customer-centric business • Competitive business modeling • Value-based business T2 modeling • Hybridity in business • Strategic alliances • Sponsored innovation • Macro business models

Business Dynamics • Competition • Collaboration • Convergence

Business Democratization • Stakeholder engagement • Reverse accountability • Decentralization • Crowd-based innovation T3 • Affordable technology and lifecycle • Learning organizations

Business Synergy Model • Design cube • Design-to-market • Design-to-society • Design-to-value • Sustainable approaches • Organic growth • Economies of scale • Risk and uncertainty

Transition in Business Modeling among Social Enterprises

Fig. 6.2 Architecting entrepreneurial business model (Source Author)

stakeholders in making business decisions (Servantie & Rispal, 2018). The second stage of the evolution of business model among entrepreneurs at the grassroots is to transit from conventional to non-conventional business practices (Moroz & Hindle, 2012). However, in the transition process (T1), the entrepreneurial firms need to adapt to pro change management organizational culture, which needs to be encouraged by transformational leadership, decisions based on market orientation, and planning for horizontal entrepreneurial growth. Such bridging touch points help entrepreneurial firms to adapt to non-conventional business practices with focus on customer-centric business and competitive modeling with value-based elicitation by engaging customers and stakeholders. The growing technology in business encourages micro, small and medium enterprises to integrate hybridity in business by adopting offline (brick)-to-online (click) O-to-O strategy to develop macro business model (Kuratko et al., 2015). The non-conventional business practices can be supported by strategic alliances between micro, small and medium enterprises, and large firms to gain advantages in production, distribution, sustainability, technology, and pooling capital resources. Such alliances also promote sponsored innovations to commercialize successful niche-based innovations in the global markets such as the portable electrocardiogram machines commercially manufactured, marketed, and branded by GE company. Further evolution of business modeling (T2) among social and commercial enterprises has been observed in the way of business democratization, which

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can be considered as people’s approach embedding crowd thinking, collective intelligence, and bottom-up determinants. These elements tend to bridge and improve the non-conventional business practices to a democratized business modeling ecosystem. The democratization in business has been explained by the management scientists as inclusivity and diversity in business, which encourage stakeholder engagement, reverse accountability (stakeholder governance), and decentralization in decisionmaking. The democratization process in business modeling is stimulated by the crowd-based innovation and collective intelligence (Lerner et al., 2018). The dissemination of knowledge from crowd platforms tends to shape the micro, small and medium enterprises as learning organizations, motivating them to adapt to systems thinking approach for continuous learning. In addition, the people’s approach in business also helps in adapting to the popular technologies, which contribute to high perceived value and help in increasing the perceived lifecycle of technology and innovation (Täuscher, 2017). The third transitory evolution of business modeling among social enterprises can be observed from business democratization to integrated business strategy development by focusing on the design cube comprising a triadic strategic approach as design-to-market, design-to-society, and design-to-value. Converging market, society, and value chain in business modeling stimulates organic growth of enterprises, which also encourages adapting to sustainable approaches (Amit & Zott, 2001). In addition, the holistic approach in business strategies to support business modeling encourages firms towards economies of scale by narrowing down the risk and uncertainties. The transition between the business democratization to business synergy-based modeling (T3) is significantly supported by the 3C elements comprising competition (customer-centric approach), collaboration (strategic alliances), and convergence (integrated growth and profit). The transitory attributes across the stages of evolution of business model (T1, T2, and T3) are illustrated in the Fig. 6.2. Social entrepreneurs, in association with social leaders, tend to engage in transforming the conventional business models in developing economies by inducting customer lifetime value as a critical indicator to the performance matrix. The social enterprises growing with new technology support prefer to operate in the hybrid system adapting to work with physical infrastructure and on digital platforms. Most social enterprises in developing countries address the social challenges embedded in sustainability goals and basic social needs spread across

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health, education, housing, transportation, and communication (Rahdari et al., 2016). These entrepreneurs also develop association with local selfhelp groups or non-profit social institutions, though they adapt to the profit-with-purpose business philosophy. George Foundation in India has emerged as a supporter of social enterprise, which is engaged in empowering women entrepreneurs by providing vocational training, education, investment and savings planning, business development, and cooperative farming. The tools for measuring the performance of the company in a given market scenario included convergence of customer lifetime-value modeling with business canvas. Accordingly, social enterprises are able to build strategies around bricks and clicks with multi-faceted market approach (Mathwick, 2017). Successful entrepreneurial business models are driven by stakeholder engagement, effective leader-member exchange, and employee engagement, which builds internal capabilities and helps in developing external relationship to manage an integrated approach of the business-design cube comprising categorical strategies of design-tomarket, design-to-society, and design-to-value (Rajagopal, 2021). Most micro, small and medium enterprises face discomfort in entering the consumer market at the first instance. Therefore, they choose to operate as feeder enterprises to large companies, omnichannel marketing outlets, modular producers, and sustainable enterprises with specific business models. Accordingly, entrepreneurs continuously evaluate business opportunities and threats to secure their market operations and reaffirm the competitive business strategies to fit into the dynamic business ecosystems. However, there exists a major challenge to safeguard the interest of emerging enterprises from the growing digital disruptions, cannibalization, and complex business ecosystems. Consequently, these enterprises tend to pave a specific path to manage their business operations in the competitive marketplace by developing organizational control standards and creating a sustainable value chain, which slows down the growth of these enterprises against mainstream competitors. Accordingly, the social enterprises engaged in sustainable production and services have disrupted organic entrepreneurial growth. It has been observed that micro, small and medium enterprises in general have an organized process in developing business models as these enterprises operate on low-resource structure in reference to investment, cost management, and use of technology, which prevents them from innovating continuously in the competitive business ecosystem. Most enterprises evolve with radical ideas, which takes substantial time to

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settle with the existing market trend and develop congruence with the economies of scale and business modeling process. However, the business modeling process in large firms follows a structured pattern, unlike the radical outlook of emerging enterprises irrespective, of their scale of business. Therefore, it is necessary for the enterprises to draw a roadmap of business model to support managerial decisions in view of business innovations, competitive dynamics, and the changing customer-centric strategies. It has been observed that most micro and small enterprises adapt to repeatable business models instead of combining best practices around the business ecosystem and internal capabilities and competencies of enterprises (Christensen et al., 2016). Most enterprises in sustainabilityled business evolve with innovative ideas, which are initially driven by the radical business model often jeopardized by unforeseen risk and uncertainty. Consequently, these enterprises are initially confined to niche market with conventional business models due to the first mover advantage. The niche markets are like comfort zones for these enterprises in the introductory period of business lifecycle, which often reduces their motivation towards exploring the growth prospects (Fernando et al., 2019). Consequently, these enterprises disregard analyzing the scope of business and its impact on their businesses. The vision of micro, small and medium enterprises is largely guided by the follower path to develop business model by observing the market challengers and leaders. As these enterprises are born with low-resource constraints, they grow in a localized environment with preconceived notions in business such as a winner-takes-all, which explains the slow and study follower behavior of these firms in the growth process. For example, most start-up enterprises engaged in developing computer applications tend to explore the success path of established companies in the niche, regional, or global markets (Casadesus-Masanell & Ricart, 2011). As most micro, small and medium enterprises have localized business projections, they are enveloped by the traditional entrepreneurial mindset emerging out of the family business practices. However, to overcome the entrepreneurial orthodoxy, there is a need to change the traditional entrepreneurial mindset and critically examine the combined effects of business analytics (industry attractiveness and bottom-line marketingmix) to gain competitive advantage. Consequently, the transformation of entrepreneurial business models needs to be redesigned to establish differentiators, performance indicators, and custom modeling by product portfolios and markets. Such scenario helps in managing the uncertainty

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and ‘what if’ concerns, which enables enterprises to track, analyze, and use inclusive decisions through customer engagement to manage competitive lead and customize the baseline business matrix (Davenport et al., 2010). The effective business modeling can be motivated by the transformational leaders who are able to connect entrepreneurs, stakeholders, and large corporations to make collaborative decisions. The social media and technologies can be effectively used in developing business processes to transform the conventional ideologies without spending time and energy in conventional meetings and struggling to compromise the decisions. Crowd-based business models have been successful to a large extent in both small and large enterprises, which built the business paradigms leveraging diverse talent, ideas, and operational guidance to foster relatively higher performance through collaborative culture (Ibarra & Hansen, 2011). Business opportunities, elements of business canvas, attributes of social motivation, and macro-factors affecting market dynamics significantly guide the development of entrepreneurial business models. The elements of business canvas comprise key partners, key resources, key activities, value propositions, customer relationships, customer segments, marketing channels, cost structure and revenue stream. Integrating these factors in business modeling for a given marketplace in a given time within the business ecosystem appears to be a major challenge for micro, small and medium enterprises. The channel management with the objective of increasing business impact in competitive marketplace to improve the market share and revenue streams is the challenging element in the business canvas (Ailawadi & Farris, 2017). The cost structure plays a moderating role in accommodating innovation, technology, value propositions, and customer relations, and carrying out key activities through the business partners. Theoretically, a business model is based on the assumptions about the elements of business canvas, analyzing the psychosocial behavior of customers, and the volatility of competitors strategies. However, steering the elements of business canvas within contemporary practices helps the enterprises in innovating business model by customizing the marketing and services mix, adapting to changing incentives in the value chain, and encouraging reverse decision-making process (Ovans, 2015). In addition, these enterprises also lack in exploring profitable business opportunities, work with market-driven and competency-based innovative business projects, and develop an appropriate business model. The

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collective intelligence supported by crowdsourcing and crowd-behavior orients entrepreneurs to identify suitable business and develop the business model accordingly. In this process, critical appraisal of technology effects (cost of technology, lifecycle, and skills), and the role of innovation incubators significantly encourages these enterprises to develop and procreate business model by exploring strategic alliances in the areas of production, distribution, and technology. Such alliances between different sizes of firms help in developing integrated business ecosystem and interdependencies (Oftedal et al., 2019). Strategic alliances can be developed with large firms in the areas of manufacturing, distribution, technology, and appropriation of finance with micro, small and medium enterprises. Such alliances will help in catering to mutual goals of solving operational problems such as improving supply chain, inventory management, developing innovative products, and delivering services to support the existing operations infrastructure. Therefore, management of key alliances requires integration of knowledge and external visibility to coordinate between the partnering firms. Exploring business opportunities as an alliance with the partnering companies needs to be systematically established to redesign production and operations activities, leverage employee feedback, and share the know-how on technology and specific management issues (Dyer et al., 2001). Most social innovations are based on the critical analysis of PNS factors, which are evolved within niche inculcating the ethnic and social values in business propositions, plays a critical role in developing entrepreneurial businesses. The social motivation in entrepreneurial business is considered as a creativity catalyzer, which is largely supported by collective intelligence, community assessment, and local preferences. In this process, transformational leadership in micro and small enterprises plays an encouraging role in integrating and empowering the employees and stakeholders to contribute to creative designing and production process by optimizing the value propositions at low cost with acceptable technology. The socially motivated entrepreneurial businesses also encourage gender equity and equality in entrepreneurship and business. Accordingly, these enterprises are able to witness bidirectional growth in upstream and downstream market. In addition, the triadic business strategy (Rajagopal, 2021) comprising design-to-market (customers and competitor-oriented strategies), design-to-society (social media-based communication diffusion and social marketing), and design-to-value (strategic customer relations, building loyalty, and co-creation) plays critical role in transforming the

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conventional family-based enterprises. Though micro, small and medium enterprises have substantial growth opportunities, they have psycho-social limitations to continue their journey in upstream markets as they are often affected by the competitive strategies stormed by unpredicted disruptions caused by low-cost radical innovations (Sutton, 2001) and prefer to stay in niche market. The financial resource management involves fund raising, resource pooling, and fund management strategies, which are necessary for an entrepreneurial business model. The major challenge in venture capital management is to ensure returns on investment in association with cost-time-risk factors and cost–benefit–profit elements to attract angel investors and crowdfunding. There is an uncertainty embedded in these fund management options (Chemmanur et al., 2011) while managing the venture capital and crowdfunding to cope with the uncertainty in innovations and market preferences. Angel investors are attracted to potential business models, which could sweep across the contemporary competition. Public policies also help micro, small and medium enterprises in pooling funds and systematic utilization of financial resources in managing production and business operations. Effective business models encourage the convergence of local–global strategy (reverse innovation) by managing divergent growth factors (micro economic and social factors) and the customer value (lifetime value, and social values). The four principal business components comprising co-creation (innovation and organizational culture), coevolution (organizational design, performance, and growth), accountability (employee engagement, empowerment, and decision-making), and customer engagement (psychosocial traits and the sense of belongingness) are essential to architect entrepreneurial business model within the social and business ecosystem (Okumu et al., 2019).

Venture Management It is easy for social enterprises to develop venture ideas based on PNS factors, but they face high complexities in managing ventures to gain competitive advantage and social values, and ensure socio-economic development for the stakeholders. The social entrepreneurial ventures are largely focused on social development and community economics perspectives, which are embedded with the goals of profit-with-purpose. Consequently, these enterprises are not focused on commercializing their products and services, but aim at developing social and economic values.

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Such dichotomy in venture management encompasses multilayered tasks assimilation with a predetermined goal of the firm. Commercialization of social entrepreneurial ventures needs a foundation with triadic pillars comprising social value centricity, market orientation, and customercentric goals. Such ventures should be managed with stakeholder engagement in creating prototypes, business models, and organizational design structure. Many firms enter strategic alliances to perform production and distribution operations with specific learning objectives as negotiated with the parent organization. The strategic focus of social entrepreneurial ventures is driven by long-term alliances on production, sustainability, innovation, technology, distribution, and pooling capital resources for the growth of ventures (Amason et al., 2006). The strategic alliances provide scope towards technology adaptation and knowledge management by exploiting effective learning opportunities to develop competitive venture frameworks. The social entrepreneurial ventures employ a combination of entrepreneurial actions, orientations, and supports derived collectively from the society, corporate sponsors, and government. Such backward and forward linkages associated with social entrepreneurial ventures help them in seeking new capabilities and expand abilities to keep pace with the social needs, market opportunities, and profit-with-purpose goals (Van Der Vegt et al., 2015). Most of the social entrepreneurial ventures evolve within the society based on the family business foundations that focus on a linear path to evolve above niche through innovation and relationship marketing. However, the organizational design and operational competencies do not encourage these ventures to go competitive, attract venture capitalists, and restructure the organizational design to operate beyond conventional workplace. Therefore, crowdfunding has emerged as a contemporary approach for expanding capital resources, and has played a critical role in developing economies by providing donation or equity-based funds to the micro, small and medium enterprises which gain market competitiveness over time (Tang & Murphy, 2012). Consequently, the crowdfunding phenomenon in establishing social entrepreneurial ventures has shown a wider scope to serve design cube philosophy comprising design-tomarket, design-to-society, and design-to-value perspectives. Therefore, convergence of profit-with-purpose philosophy and design cube business strategy adds value to enterprises in expanding new business portfolios. Such practices are commonly supported by the angel investors to promote the market competitiveness of micro, small, and medium enterprises.

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Consequently, such enterprises are able to raise their capital and invest in profitable portfolios with the help of angel investors or venture capitalists. Under such financial collaboration, enterprises are able to manage their enterprises by building portfolio-specific entrepreneurial ecosystem within the broad philosophy of inclusive business (Gompers et al., 2021). The philosophy of social entrepreneurial ventures contributes to inclusivity and diversity in business with low-cost operations within the broad framework of design cube. These enterprises initially carry out their business in niche market and attempt to expand their scale of business by penetrating the upstream market. They exploit the market ladder based on the expansion of portfolios and geodemographic outreach over time. Accordingly, the social entrepreneurial ventures are built around contemporary functional dynamics, venture foundations, business canvas, and organizational resources. These enterprises operate on small scales, abide to low-cost operations and design-to-society as the key philosophies, and tend to shift their business from niche markets to upstream market by expanding their scale of business (Picken, 2017). They exploit the market ladder from niche market to the big, middle market segment and reach out to the upstream market. Accordingly, these enterprises tend to enhance their outreach by focusing on the social and economic portfolios across the geodemographic segments. Such expansion significantly attracts the government and the industry to create social values and effectively engage in corporate social responsibility by respective entities. Micro, small and medium enterprises have a blend of social, economic, and market-oriented concepts within the existing business ecosystem. Accordingly, the vision, mission, and goals are determined by the women entrepreneurs for their ventures of various size (Horne et al., 2019). The venture foundation also requires an efficient resource mapping to manage the functional dynamics comprising production process and operations management (logistics, inventory management, and supply channels). Commonly, these enterprises are seeded in niche market, and face challenges in developing competitive marketing strategies and stakeholder value through effective customer relationship management by developing innovative products and services convergent with the PNS factors. Relationship management also helps the social entrepreneurial ventures to gain stakeholder confidence and loyalty in delivering valueadded products and services. In the process of managing functional dynamics, innovation and technology play a critical role to ensure the convergence of low cost and high quality to gain market competitiveness

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and customer loyalty. Nonetheless, stakeholders contribute significantly to social entrepreneurial venture management and guide the managerial process in developing market layout for products and services at the grassroots. Such approach attributes to distinguishing these enterprises as the nuclei of inclusive business philosophy as against the for-profit ventures (Siqueira et al., 2018). The basic challenge for these enterprises is to develop business strategies by considering all elements of the business canvas systematically. Identifying key resources, key activities, and key partners in managing entrepreneurial ventures with social and sustainability goals are the principal requirements to connect the social entrepreneurial philosophies with business goals. The key partners are identified meticulously in the context of cost–benefit analysis, and firms tend to develop strategic alliances to gain market competitiveness and enhance the revenue streams through business diversifications. With the gradual growth of business, these entrepreneurial firms are able to acquire contemporary knowledge and skills by integrating the crowd resources (crowd sourcing and crowd funding) leading to collective intelligence (Anand et al., 2021). The stakeholders constitute an integral part of these ventures, and social governance influences the functionality of these enterprises directly or indirectly. The crowd cognition and socio-cultural values motivate these entrepreneurs to stand with transformational leadership by encouraging employees to participate in decision-making, exercise functional autonomy, and develop relationship with external firms. Transformational leadership attributes encourage entrepreneurs to seek public–private partnership and ensure organic growth and inculcate social responsibility to create social value. The social enterprises largely focus on ethnic values in business, which carry ambidextrous benefits to create value in the society, and gain attention of customers in competitive market. Such strategy in social enterprises has opened new avenues in developing venture campaign with generic social innovation and low-cost technologies (Cabraal et al., 2005). To achieve market competitiveness, these enterprises largely rely on customer patronage and try to evolve through cooptation (cooperative competition). These enterprises are engaged in manufacturing products with social and ethnic designs coupled with alliance brands as a cooptation strategy to grow alongside of contemporary social brands (Hout & Ghemawat, 2010). Governments and industries with the goals of social value creation in developing economies encourage social enterprises to

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connect with global concerns of international organizations such as World Bank and OECD, which encourage entrepreneurs to acquire skill development training for continuous learning to strengthen their innovative and technological business endeavors. As most micro, small and medium enterprises operate with low resources and conventional organizational design, the venture management practices face several setbacks concerning production and operations activities. These enterprises evolving out of family businesses have a narrow focus in marketing strategies due to their confinement to niche segment. The major problem encountered by these enterprises is to overcome conventional business and adapt to innovative ideas. Consequently, many enterprises have initial negative returns due to centralized leadership, poor innovation, lack of team culture, or unrealistic business ideas. These ventures also fall into various organizational problems including identifying promising talents, encouraging teamwork culture for collective decision-making, developing employee-oriented human resource policies, identifying strategic partners to drive business operations in upstream markets, establishing alliances, and attracting angel investors. A proper management of such entrepreneurial grid helps in overcoming the false starts and streamlining agile workplace culture to uncertain vertical and horizontal growth of business (Chliova & Ringov, 2017). An appropriate management of these factors contributes to a quick and confident start by utilizing stakeholder resources and developing market competitiveness. It is necessary for the social enterprises to adapt to challenge-based research in the context of PNS factors and collective ideas to develop a confident start of business in low-end markets. Such strategy can avoid triangulation in business operations, customer values, and market competitiveness (Eisenmann, 2021). New entrepreneurial portfolios based on low-cost innovation, utilitarian values, and social marketing have emerged as the new drivers of social enterprises in the changing business taxonomy. The entrepreneurial portfolios can be developed by integrating stakeholder and crowd insights to support creativity in business, consumer-led innovations, and market dynamics. Therefore, entrepreneurial portfolios have shown convergence between large organizations and small entrepreneurial firms as feeder channels. Creative construction emphasizes redesigning an enterprise in accordance with the dynamic entrepreneurial and market ecosystems (Pisano & Christensen, 2020).

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The creativity in enterprises can be developed by understanding various competitive and consumer perspectives to drive the enterprises competitive. Therefore, creativity in enterprises can be inducted through organizational culture and market dynamics, which not only stimulates new ideas and their validation, but also helps in determining the scope of new businesses across geodemographic segments. Accordingly, a combination of customer-centric and market-oriented entrepreneurial portfolios can be developed through demand-based investments, sustainable consumptions, and developing alliances with large companies to make appropriate manufacturing and marketing decisions. Such linear entrepreneurial business path leads to customer-centric lean approach in business to compete with existing players in the market. The lean strategies include need-based production, pro-market venture capital investment mindsets, and settingup the competitive business development process (Fichter & Clausen, 2016). Blending entrepreneurial portfolios with crowd-based innovative ideas helps entrepreneurs make popular decisions for manufacturing and marketing to make their business stances easy and certain in the competitive markets. Such entrepreneurial behavior drives agility in leadership and business operations within the organization. However, developing agility in business decision in context to the market dynamics remains a major challenge among the women enterprises at the base of the industry (Kidder & Geraci, 2018). Agility in social enterprises is largely supported by the government, social institutions, and corporations interested in expanding their businesses to the regional and bottom of the pyramid markets. Consequently, the entrepreneurial agility supported by these institutions helps in exploring the potential partners and developing portfolios for commons. The new ideas are incubated to stimulate new entrepreneurial portfolios based on the agile behavior of consumers, stakeholders, and sponsors (large firms), which motivate collective decisions, flexible working patterns, and managing the scale of operations catering to mutual goals with business partners. Most business incubators such as Hotbank and Idea Lab have emerged as network incubators, which provide capital and human resources, social infrastructure, technology, and basic services to social enterprises to drive social consciousness and sustainability-led innovation. The business economy of social enterprises in rural and semi-urban ecosystems have been benefitted by the growing entrepreneurial incubators. The dissemination of knowledge on business modeling and skills in managing innovation in new portfolios contributed by the incubator

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have stimulated the manufacturing and marketing dynamics, decisionmaking, and operational practices of these enterprises, which have driven them to the new generation entrepreneurial management with a strategic focus (Hansen et al., 2000). The decentralization in decision-making by encouraging reverse accountability, crowd thinking, and understanding the cross-cultural dynamics of customers helps enterprises proactively nurture the agile practices with a focus on design-to-market, designto-society, and design-to-value (Rajagopal, 2021). The agile business practices are encouraged by the social evangelists who proactively create awareness and attract new customers to strengthen the business at the grassroots. Agility in enterprises allows acquiring and accumulating resources and capabilities, and encourage teams to customize their work processes to achieve flexible targets over the conventional entrepreneurial behaviors (Rigby et al., 2016). The microfinance institutions, as financial pillars of the society in congruence with the philosophy of crowd-based enterprises, stimulate the growth of social enterprises in developing economies. These institutions significantly encourage the public participation to generate adequate institutional resources to support the creative, sustainable, and innovative enterprises at the grassroots to develop inclusive value chains. The microfinance institutions—Bandhan (meaning bond in English) in India could attract international investors to induce innovation and technology within the organization to break the conventional barriers and transform the organizational philosophy and operational processes into a formal banking industry. This institution has been developed as a social and financial venture by acquiring the hybrid capabilities and competencies (Dhanaraj & Shah, 2016). Previous experiences, social assumptions, self-concepts, and lessons drawn from the successful business models, have motivated micro, small, and medium enterprises to develop sustainability and customer-centric trades as a new generation challenge. These influencing factors attribute to generic cognition, and tend to form entrepreneurial mindset to take up social trades as business products and services. However, the main challenge in adapting to these ideas requires to refurbish contemporary knowledge and managerial designs as a continuous learning process. Therefore, to succeed in a competitive marketplace, social and sustainable entrepreneurial trades grow as learning organizations to critically examine the contemporary changes and develop internal fit to adapt to the change dynamics. Consequently, architecting an entrepreneurial business is considered as a strategic perception

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within the dynamic ecosystem of society, business, and changing growth patterns. Learning by experience and learning by adaptation to best practices needs critical appraisal of causes and effects in managing business. Continuous learning develops the measures to authenticate the marketdriven ideas in view of the incidences of success and failure of similar enterprises within the industry. In reinforcing the entrepreneurial products and services with social and sustainable philosophy, it is necessary for these enterprises to develop unique product propositions, achieve high brand equity, and maintaining pace (first mover advantage) in competitive marketplace. Therefore, entrepreneurs need to update their knowledge and skills by following the philosophy of cooperation for competition and develop congruence with the manufacturing and marketing practices of established firms to support the desired business growth in divergent market conditions. Therefore, the upcoming enterprises must set higher learning goals and develop an attitude for experimentation of radical innovative ideas and embed their growth prospects within the industry (Ibarra, 2015).

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CHAPTER 7

The Road Ahead

Innovation Management The innovation trajectory among micro, small and medium enterprises commonly evolves around inexperienced propositions starting from ideation to commercialization of innovative products and services. Therefore, the journey of these enterprises in managing innovation projects often succumb to amateur business models within the inner entrepreneurial circle comprising leaders and employees. To overcome these limitations, entrepreneurs need to explore and define a broad scope of the innovations, which have the potential for commercialization, by analyzing the market ecosystem including customers, stakeholders, and crowd at large. The successful innovative projects carried out by micro, small and medium enterprises have clear vision on the customer use value derived from the problems, needs, and solutions (PNS) factors. Accordingly, the innovative ideas are nurtured in the context of utilitarian and hedonic values. The marketability of innovative products and services is widely based on crowd behavior, which can be observed through the social media and collective intelligence. Accordingly, entrepreneurs should develop business model for commercializing innovations ensuring social and personal values of customers and stakeholders. The collective intelligence has emerged as a boon for innovators of micro and small enterprises who get plethora of customer-centric and business-to-business © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9_7

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ideas queuing for manufacturing and marketing within the competitive market eco system (Centola, 2022). The progressive entrepreneurs engaged in developing social and sustainability-led innovative products redefine their business models with a focus on disruptive attributes to override the complexities of the existing competition and grow proactively in the market. The disruptive innovations emerging from the grassroots with low-cost attributes quickly attract the suppliers and the end users, and create a major threat to the existing commercial innovative brands. Consequently, the innovation ecosystem not only provides the competitive advantage, but also helps in developing customer orientation to unfamiliar brands and lowcost innovations based on home grown technologies (Annala et al., 2018). The innovation journey of micro, small and medium enterprises needs a consistent growth, which requires customer-centricity, experiential marketing approaches, and contextual innovations to engage customers in cocreation and consumption process, and foster repeat buying behavior among consumers for low-cost innovations. As these enterprises commonly evolve from family businesses, they adapt to grow with conventional wisdom, which obstructs their business trajectory due to a lack of monitoring and evaluation at various stages from conceptualizing innovation to commercialization of innovative products. These enterprises must develop a growth charter by planning various manufacturing and marketing activities plotting the work breakdown structure and avoiding the scope creep in the project. The growth of enterprises in the context of innovation and marketing should be monitored and evaluated through a stage-gate process by determining the objectives to be accomplished at each stage and perform checks and balances at the gate while transiting across the stages (Rajagopal, 2014). These enterprises must engage in exclusive brainstorming to explore new innovation ideas having the potential for commercialization and evaluate the cost-time-risk (CTR) factors associated with the technologies to determine the product design and process. The cost of technology contributes significantly to managing the economies of scale of innovative products with focus on developing competitive business model and adding values to the product (Brunswicker & Chesbrough, 2018). The major challenge in this process lies in pooling of capital resources and developing budgetary appropriation to make decision on investment in innovation. Consequently, the returns on investment can be measured from the perspective of PNS factors in competitive designing,

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the ease of use of technology, and embedded perceived values. These elements determine both the scope of innovation and marketability. Besides the organizational complexities associated with micro, small and medium enterprises, the major challenge for these enterprises is towards developing a concept map for commercializing innovation by identifying the right consumer segments, target markets, perceived use value, competitive gains, and value-for-money. The synergy in developing an integrated commercial innovation model largely depends on selecting the right indicators in manufacturing and marketing and using an appropriate technology in manufacturing products. However, technology diffusion, developing servitization and competitive advantages, and adding customer value helps these enterprises in formalizing and implementing the commercialization process for innovative entrepreneurial products (Miller & Garnsey, 2000). In this process, entrepreneurs also need to identify alternate technologies, vertical and horizontal scope of improvement, user-driven values, and co-creating the consumption behavior by inculcating social consciousness. In commercializing innovations, these enterprises need to ensure continuous learning, teamwork culture, reverse accountability, knowledge and skill development, crowd behavior analysis, and market intelligence (Rajagopal, 2014). Innovation in micro and small enterprises evolves as a single destination experiment with limited capital and human resources. These innovation experiments are largely longitudinal, which are backed by incremental innovations subject to their availability of resources and infrastructure. Therefore, it is necessary to deploy the concept of an innovation-journey manager in micro and small enterprises to monitor the evolution of innovation across pre-defined stages (Edelman & Singer, 2015). Low capital innovation projects adopted by micro, small and medium enterprises tend to gain knowledge on product attributes to develop perceived use value and trust within the niche market. The localized marketing of innovative products not only provides a pilot experience in commercialization, but also develops confidence among stakeholders, customer, and employees to drive the business to the next milestone. Transformational leadership also plays a significant role in driving cognitive dynamics among the human capital of the enterprise, and evolves as a team contribution by sharing experience, culture, functional agility, and learning as the project unfolds. The innovation ideas are also supported by experience, skills, technical abilities, and probable use value of the deliverables (Prajogo, 2016). Due to the centralized leadership vested within the

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traditional entrepreneurial business model, most firms face complexities of decision-making towards marketability, information analysis, and reactions of industry for the innovative products. Collective intelligence supports knowledge repositories to refine innovations, develop trust in ideas, and demonstrate competencies to plan their effective commercial execution. In the organizational context, innovation-led ideas often develop initial dichotomy in proposing innovative business models. Such rift in the organizations commonly occurs in accepting the change management process to accommodate innovation, business models, and associated risks (Rajagopal, 2022). The teamwork models, reverse accountability, and stakes of customers in the innovation process help entrepreneurs in developing pro-market innovations overriding the conventional wisdom. Therefore, restructuring organizational design to decentralize decisionmaking and develop systems thinking to carry-out multidisciplinary functions is a new uphill task to nurture market-oriented innovations. The delegation of managerial tasks is often obscured in entrepreneurial firms irrespective of size due to limited human capital, organizational capabilities, and competencies (Harrison & Johnson, 2019). It is difficult for sole enterprises to nurture innovations and develop effective business model to commercialize them in the upstream markets. Therefore, the governments of developing countries must encourage entrepreneurial consortiums with multidisciplinary workstations to encourage innovations based on market trends and entrepreneurial research by exploiting global talent through alliances and digital networks. Such arrangements can be developed through public policies, social institutions, and public–private-partnerships to encourage market-oriented consortium initiatives. The consortium enterprises must develop systems thinking and work through the innovation charters within the project management framework (Peterson, 2020). However, enough skilldevelopment opportunities need to be created to support an innovation project management approach within the entrepreneurial consortiums. The updated knowledge and skills will help the enterprises narrow down the embedded entrepreneurial risks and operational dilemmas to manage the innovation projects and their commercialization. Innovation projects need to be coordinated by an efficient project manager who assumes the charge of developing the complete project charter, sets stage-gate process, takes approval of toll gates periodically to conform with the project continuum, and avoids the project scope-creep (entertaining unplanned project deviations causing the effects of cost-time-risk). A too

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early announcement of innovation outcome might attract market disruptors causing the outgrowth of competitive products to cannibalize the expected innovation (Rajagopal, 2022). Consequently, micro, small and medium enterprises must be encouraged to evolve as consortium within the industry, establish their presence on social media channels, diffuse innovations and their outcomes through digital platforms, and develop ethnic cultural, and value-oriented consumer knowledge. In developing economies, innovation-led enterprises need to be supported by public policies and social institutions in enhancing the scope of business and financial returns under predetermined systematic project management approach. The self-help groups, consortium enterprises, cooperatives, and alliance innovation enterprises mediate resource planning with their partner organizations and monitor its implementation through social governance or reverse accountability (Wilson & Doz, 2012). The market-oriented innovative products developed by these enterprises can be diffused through hybrid platforms combining brickand-mortar, and digital platforms to provide convenience to suppliers and consumers. The hybrid intelligent enterprises in the contemporary business ambience tend to develop alliances with competent firms in the technology markets to gain market competitiveness in divergent consumer segments. The interactive business platforms help in integrating the opinions and values of crowd in general, and targeted customers in particular, to enhance collective knowledge, perceived use value, and brand equity for innovative products of micro, small and medium enterprises. These firms cooperate with their business partners, customers, and stakeholders to collaborate, create, and communicate (3C’s) knowledge to diffuse, distinguish, and deliver (3D’s) innovations. The functionality of micro and small enterprises with 3C’s and 3D’s innovation management concept is intertwined and complicated. The convergence of above elements is necessary to break hierarchical governance to overcome the problems of the conventional organizational design. Such transformation in enterprises is essential for improving the performance of the firms by integrating the 3C’s and 3D’s concepts. These enterprises lead to distributed innovation, which capitalizes on the creativity of its collaborators, customers, and stakeholders to gain market competitiveness (Rajagopal, 2022). The process of managing innovation and new product development is spread across five principal domains comprising foundations, drivers, strategy, entrepreneurial focus, and market, which are built around the existing market competition, industry attractiveness, the scope of market

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outreach, and agglomeration of enterprises as consortium. These principal domains and their attributes are illustrated in Fig. 7.1. The stakeholders and customers form the inner core of entrepreneurial foundation, while the outer core of entrepreneurial activities is influenced by the crowd behavior. The leadership (individual, collective, conventional, or transformational) is the pivot of entrepreneurship, which not only helps in decision-making but also contributes to acquiring knowledge, developing ideas, and managing resources. The entrepreneurial leaders, stakeholders, customers, and crowd significantly stimulate the entrepreneurial process, which reveals knowing, doing, and being. The drivers that support enterprises to carry out innovation and new product development constitute organizational culture, which is gradually transforming from individual task manager to teamwork culture beyond the conventional practices in the family business (Barbosa et al., 2021). The contemporary drivers to motivate innovation and new product development have emerged as 3C factors comprising collaboration, co-creation, and communication by engaging stakeholders and key partners. In addition, continuous learning drives the enterprises to function as learning enterprises by developing the congruence in knowledge and skills at par with the contemporary entrepreneurial and market ecosystems. In the innovation and new product development process, strategy is one of the principal domains which guides entrepreneurs to reorient their operational system. The contemporary strategy for the new product development and contextual innovation is transiting from market-oriented (competitive) practices to customer-centric approaches based on the PNS factors. However, achieving market competitiveness seems to be a conventional yardstick for entrepreneurs, which helps them in carrying out appropriate market segmentation, and measuring the cost-timerisk (CTR) and cost–benefit–profit (CBP). The effective entrepreneurial drivers and appropriate strategy guide entrepreneurs to develop the right entrepreneurial focus to carry out innovation and new product development. The entrepreneurial focus on innovation varies by trade, region, and market. The taxonomy of innovation includes frugal innovation (low-cost innovation), reverse innovation (local–global convergence), and radical innovation (disruptive). These classified innovation practices are supported by the technology attributes comprising cost of technology, knowledge and skills, ease of use, perceived use value, and lifecycle, which stimulate the innovations for commercialization in both brick-and-mortar and hybrid platforms (Ahluwalia et al., 2020). The successful enterprises

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• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Market Pro-market innovations Sustainability 3D attributes New product management

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Patronage Government, public policies Social institutions Public-private-partnership Venture capitalists

Entrepreneurial Focus Innovation taxonomy Technology attributes Commercialization Hybrid platforms PM framework

Strategy Customer-centric Market-oriented Competitiveness CTR and CBP Segmentation

Ecosystems • Entrepreneurial • Market • Social

Market competition Industry attractiveness International outreach Entrepreneurial consortium

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Local market

Upstream market

Drivers Organizational culture Family business 3C factors Continuous learning Knowledge and skills • • • • •

Market outreach beyond boundaries

Foundation Stakeholders Customers and crowd Leadership Resource management Decision-making

Fig. 7.1 Managing innovation and new product development (Source Author)

engaged in innovation and new product development adapt to project management framework by developing the innovation charter and work breakdown structure to deliver the products in business-to-consumer and business-to-business market segments on schedule. The project management approach also helps entrepreneurs in measuring the changes in the cost structure by analyzing the scope creep against the predetermined work breakdown structure (Fernandez et al., 2018). The micro, small and medium enterprises functioning efficiently within the principal, as discussed above, are able to market their innovative products successfully in local and upstream markets by attracting consumers. These enterprises can enhance their market outreach beyond boundaries by opening new channels based on information technology such as mobile commerce and electronic commerce. However, for enterprises to successfully function within the above principal domains, a strong patronage is required in developing countries. The governments and their public policies, social institutions, public–private-partnership, entrepreneurial evangelists, and venture capitalists can provide effective patronage to these enterprises. Nonetheless, it is challenging for micro, small and medium enterprises to gain competitive advantage across the

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existing social and market ecosystems, as entrepreneurs need to stay dynamic to observe and adapt to the changes (Priem & Alfano, 2016). Most micro, small and medium enterprises engaged in disruptive innovation at low cost are increasingly adapting to distributive innovation by developing collaborations with large industries or working in entrepreneurial consortiums besides channelizing innovative products in the big middle and upstream markets. Distributive innovation is a refined version of collaborative innovation in which the micro and small enterprises tend to break the chaos of disruptive innovations and channelize innovations-to-market (Jarvenpaa & Välikangas, 2014). The distributed innovation management also has a concept identical to umbrella creation (community creation), which is largely emphasized as open innovation and linked to open market-based innovation model (Rajagopal, 2022). The social and sustainable innovation, which are supported by the social institutions and the government agencies in developing countries encourage entrepreneurs to establish creative communities with a focus on customer-centric marketing. Converging creativity in innovation with disruptive market opportunities, and collaborations with stakeholders and partner firms tend to strengthen the marketability of these products. Such convergent business model integrates hierarchical innovation with layered decisions from stakeholders, customers, and collective intelligence. Consequently, distributive innovation evolves with open innovation and open market systems considering the customer preferences and identifying new approaches to grow in a competitive marketplace. However, distributive innovation is also risk averse due to uncertainty and chaos in the market because of identical and similar products with commercial branding effects. Such innovation is sensitive to market shifts, and often fails to create umbrella branding for hierarchical and inter-generational products (Xin et al., 2022). The entrepreneurs engaged in distributive innovation must ensure strong alliances in manufacturing and marketing to stay proactive to the consumer demand and seek competitive benefits. The market ecosystem today has grown dynamic, flexible, assorted, and cohesive. These attributes demand for the creation of collaborative knowledge together with the entire innovation and marketing teams to stay dominant in a given market at a given time (Boland & Tenkasi, 1995).

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New Product Management The design thinking and the architecture of new product development based on open innovations are frequently growing across industries irrespective of the size of the enterprise and the scale of business. Radical transformation in industry attractiveness and the structure of market competition have significantly influenced the innovation process and strategies leading to disruptions in business. Therefore, the architecture for innovation management actively moderates the negotiation among innovators, suppliers, vendors, and users at the grassroots. The changing model for commercializing innovation has a linear path integrating users, referrals, gatekeepers, collaborators, angel investors, and brand managers to upscale the innovation projects. In collaborative and open innovative process, entrepreneurs explore ideas to develop new products by observing the market trends acting on social stimulus, learning from customers and stakeholders, and analyzing the collective intelligence inputs (Gmelin & Seuring, 2014). As social innovations are largely based on PNS factors, the major challenge faced by enterprises is to develop attributes preferred by the users, which helps in establishing complementarity with existing products and the unique selling proposition overriding the existing products. However, most disruptive innovations succumb to short life cycles like fashion accessories, toys, and season apparel. The fashion design companies have disrupted the fashion markets by using branded organic fabric manufactured from organic cotton, which is grown without pesticides and synthetics fertilizers and are processed with no chemicals. Such disruptive innovation in fashion apparel industry has attracted eco-friendly customers who prefer to use sustainable products and abide to the social green consciousness. The disruptive innovation companies, upon the successful development of prototypes, backward linkages, and innovation collaborations can introduce radical products in competitive markets. Such innovations face the challenge in market testing to manage segmentation, targeting, and positioning of disruptive products. Therefore, predicting long-term business growth for disruptive innovation is a difficult proposition. The market planning to diffuse innovations needs mapping of resource management, creating design-tomarket strategy (including go-to-market strategy), and ensuring customer relationship to create value (Magistretti et al., 2021). The firms engaged

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in developing fast-moving consumer goods adapt to the open innovation model, which analyzes the crowd inputs to support design thinking process across the following stages: • Discovering the attributes of disruptive innovation congruent with the social insights, support the PNS factors and gain competitive advantage • Architecting design for innovative products by identifying the vulnerable areas in the innovation process including CTR and CBP factors besides the unique selling propositions to support commercialization of innovative products • Developing prototype to provide potential solutions to the existing consumer problems and validating them through consumer jury comprising stakeholders, design engineers, suppliers, business administrators, and legal representatives of the firm • Delivering applied solutions by constituting an effective supply chain and servitization model In addition, innovation management needs to be supported by various functions, principally strategic alliances, across manufacturing, product design, technology, distribution, and finance factors. The strategic alliances also help in coordinating operations and supply chain management. The inclusive business approach allows customers and stakeholders to contribute to various business decisions to improve the functionality and value integration process. An appropriate integration of the above six stages of innovation management helps enterprises in increasing competitiveness and creating value-based advantages against disruptive innovations (Miles et al., 2018). Branding of local innovations is important to outreach the consumer segments, and position the innovation as a commodity. In addition, successful innovations embed servitization benefits to manage the innovation portfolios successfully. The marketing mix for innovative products should be designed comprehensively with 11Ps comprising—product, price, place, promotion, packaging, pace, people, performance, psychodynamics, posture, and proliferation (Rajagopal, 2019). The customercentric innovative products are designed with the attributes congruent with consumer preferences, which enhance the perceived use value and

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improve the product lifecycle (Tai, 2017). The disruptive innovative products are largely focused on competitive pricing to support the consumer affordability. However, innovative products positioned in the upstream markets constitute the value-based pricing to correlate the positive pricequality relationship. Successful firms that manufacture innovative products focus on multichannel marketing and need-based promotions with sustainable packaging which supports green consumerism. The disruptive innovative products are sensitive to the product launch in the context of pricing, distribution, and promotion to gain the first mover advantage and perceive customer loyalty. The crowd behavior on innovative products stimulates consumers, referrals, and gatekeepers proactively towards buying and adapting products. However, disruptive innovative products developed by micro, small and medium enterprises face a major challenge of unfamiliar branding, which affects the performance of innovative products against the existing familiar brands. Therefore, firms must communicate the pilot marketing results through social media and on interpersonal platforms to exhibit the product performance. The addition, the product portfolios, and product line management can also be linked to the performance of innovative products in pilot markets. Positive psychodynamics developed through crowd channels and digital marketing platforms also promote the consumption of innovative products. Interactive marketing strategies combined with social media and community networking not only help in stimulating the psychodynamics of consumers, but also strengthen the posture of the firm and brand through unique entrepreneurial identity, brand reputation, and the corporate identity of the firm (Efrat et al., 2017). As disruptive innovations have short lifecycles, firms need to ensure vertical growth by developing next generation products and bridging the generations to create ambidextrous consumer value across generations. Therefore, proliferation of disruptive innovation adds value to enhance confidence among the end users and brand equity against the existing products in the competitive marketplace (Davidsson et al., 2020). Entrepreneurial Challenges and Innovations Social and economic factors affect innovations in products and services at the niche segment, which faces major challenges in commercializing in the upstream market segment due to competitive barriers. Most innovations carried out by micro, small and medium enterprises are based on

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socio-cultural and ethnic needs and have evolved as destination experiments. Therefore, such innovations are localized and face challenges in sharing knowledge, supply chain thrust, and building customer value. The resource limitations and leadership drive also significantly affect the commercialization of localized innovations despite their commercial potential. However, the marketing support by large firms to commercialize the niche-based innovations have largely stimulated the products of local enterprises. The efforts of large firms to commercialize local innovations are identified as reverse innovation projects, and specific innovative products based on their market potential are considered as innovationled product-marketing projects. Multinational companies like General Electrics have encouraged reverse innovations in developing countries and commercialized innovative products like the prototype of mobile electrocardiogram machines by developing appropriate brand effects (GE MAC 400 and GE MAC 800). The major challenge for micro, small and medium enterprises is to develop a convergence between low-cost technology and the marketing strategy by establishing unique contribution of innovations embedding desired customer values. It is essential for new innovations to grow effective and stronger to resist the market competition and avoid the cannibalization by competing innovations. Innovative products in the niche market might gain positive impact in the short term, but they stay risk averse for their strategic growth as they often fail to inculcate customer value, brand impact, and competitive advantages to stimulate entrepreneurial revenue and develop posture. However, there are some exceptions of reverse innovations developed by micro enterprises or family businesses at the niche level that have been successfully commercialized by large enterprises. Such reverse innovation projects have contributed to high returns and low risk due to effective brand propagation by the collaborating firms (Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000). For example, the prophylactic medicine with natural ingredients manufactured by local firms based on cultural and ethnic practices, such as the hard candies with the blend of natural honey and lemon, has been commercialized by Procter and Gamble as Vicks Honey Cough remedy available as over-the-counter product. This is a successful example of reverse innovation, which has been improved in design and process by Procter and Gamble to meet the needs of consumer with integrated social and ethnic wisdom in developing countries like India. It’s a low-cost branded alternative to more expensive cold remedies that attract the consumers to

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home-based commercialized medication (Dong et al., 2023). In addition, market-based innovations have positive effects on enterprises and product performance, while technology-based innovations have stronger effects on value creation and adaptability. In view of the support from large firms to promote reverse innovation, the entrepreneurial philosophy in the twenty-first century has shifted from conventional wisdom acquired through social influences and family businesses to computer-aided entrepreneurial strategy and artificial intelligence backed by innovation approaches. Consequently, entrepreneurship has become central to economic and technological advancement, which provides opportunities to micro, small and medium enterprises to grow beyond niche and stay competitive (Rajagopal, 2022). Consequently, most micro enterprises today are evolving with technology and digital innovations, which are appreciated and supported by the large firms in view of the contemporary demand for digital interface in products and services. Accordingly, the technology-based micro enterprises are engaged in developing hybrid products to make them compatible with the internet-of-things philosophy to improve their product value and market competitiveness. As the digital applications demonstrate higher potential for commercialization, the crowd-based ideas and collective intelligence driven by the social media have encouraged disruptive innovations significantly. The digital applications, as service disruptors in various industries like tourism to stimulate marketability of services and products, have been initially tested and commercialized. The disruptive technologies used in innovative tourism like Airbnb and Uber have been developed by MSMEs as digital applications for pilot testing within niche, which have attracted larger tourism industries over time (Moyle et al., 2015). Continuous innovation and commercial prospects of innovative products have significantly contributed to economic growth in developing countries. The crowd-based innovation has facilitated the market-oriented design thinking for developing new products and services, and managing the cost, time, risk, and returns framework of entrepreneurial firms. The crowd behavior on entrepreneurial products have been experimented across the farm and non-farm sectors, which are supported by the social institutions, self-help groups, and public policies. Farmers’ cooperatives in Japan and India, entrepreneurial associations in Thailand and India, and social institutions driven by self-help groups or non-governmental organizations in India, Bangladesh, and Mexico have evidenced innovative business practices in farm, non-farm, and micro finance trades. The

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stakeholder engagement in business models in the above sectors across countries has transformed the entrepreneurial behavior to converge social needs with market trends. The institutional approach of engaging stakeholders in these enterprises has helped in reducing functional uncertainty, and improving production and services potential to facilitate economic growth. This approach has evolved by measuring the entrepreneurial strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the context of the abilities to commercialize innovation by developing resistance to risk, market foresights, and collective growth approaches (Autio et al., 2014). The changing customer ecosystems stimulate the balance of market supplies and demands affecting the functionality of the enterprises. Such transition in entrepreneurial activities needs continuous institutional support and modified public policies to support the changing business models and the prospects of entrepreneurial activities. Therefore, strategic support to entrepreneurship needs to be developed by collective policy decisions and social representations in entrepreneurial institutions, which provide competitive pace to niche-based enterprises (Klein, 2017). Consequently, long-term planning for entrepreneurial development with a focus on appropriate business model contributes to the critical engagement of policy makers, social leaders, corporate management, and entrepreneurs on predetermined philosophy of growth.

NEST and SUBADI Entrepreneurship Domains Historically, entrepreneurship has emerged as an income-generating activity at the household level without focusing on continuous innovation and growth in the market. Most entrepreneurial activities at the grassroots have evolved as learning organization by acquiring skills through transgenerational process. Evolution of entrepreneurship with conventional wisdom within the social ecosystem is confined to low-risk and low-income attributes affecting the business growth and quality of social life of entrepreneurs. The need-based ecological strategic transformation (NEST) of entrepreneurship is an emerging concept, which consists in engaging knowledge and skills in innovation by understanding the customer needs and its long-term effect (strategic) to support both innovation and the business model (Jafari-Sadeghi et al., 2023). The NEST concept (Rajagopal & Rajagopal, 2023) of entrepreneurship strengthens the entrepreneurial activities to focus on customer centricity and strategies for marketing innovative products with competitive CTR factors to derive

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an advantage on embedded benefits and profits in the marketplace overriding the competitive barriers. The NEST attributes can be developed within the social and cultural environment by developing individual focus on entrepreneurship or in a consortium to encourage suitable organizational and sustainable entrepreneurial design (Dimov, 2021). In either form, the NEST concept can be seeded as a growth agent within the industry by connecting with strategic alliances, and public and private resource pools. The industrial support and public policies have made joint efforts to organize individual entrepreneurs to reorient them into a scientific business modeling process. In emerging economies today, institutional entrepreneurs in various productive sectors such as food industry, textile, fashion accessories, farm activities, leisure and tourism, and industrial alliances have developed legitimate organizational firms to provide business solutions to customers and society. The entrepreneurial logic in doing business with various entrepreneurial traits is evolved around three conceptual entrepreneurial domains comprising NEST, SUBADI, and CPIRT as illustrated in Fig. 7.2. The focus on need-based innovation is one of the emerging requirements to offer applied innovative solutions to the stakeholders and customers in the market (Wood & Swait, 2002). Simultaneously, the focus on ecological entrepreneurship adds to the sustainable need-based innovation process. The above attributes that foster entrepreneurial business opportunities should be considered from the ecological and sustainable perspectives as the socially conscious consumers look for green entrepreneurial products. Ecological entrepreneurship also adheres to the growing concept of triple bottom line consisting of people (stakeholders and customers), planet (sustainable products and services), and profit (a key perspective for entrepreneurial growth). Successful entrepreneurs develop a strategic thinking approach for holistic transformation of entrepreneurial trade with focus on commercialization and outreach to upstream markets as against the tactical approach of confining the entrepreneurial activities to niche market (Zahra & Nambisan, 2012). Another principal entrepreneurial domain with conceptual attributes is determined as SUBADI as exhibited in the Fig. 7.2. The core attribute of SUBADI is to enhance the scope of eco-entrepreneurship within the framework of sustainability goals. The social and business scope of entrepreneurship is to develop products and services for mass consumers, and generate social consciousness to use sustainable products. Therefore, the omnipresence of entrepreneurial products and services in the markets

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are essential to add value and generate competitiveness. Accordingly, entrepreneurs need to establish business goals to reach ambidextrous markets across upstream and downstream consumer segments. Simultaneously, the emerging enterprises also need to be cautious towards marginalizing the overhead and operational costs to reduce the incidence of cost-to-enterprise, which affects the entrepreneurial profit and growth. To achieve operational efficiency among SUBADI concept, the diffusion of knowledge and skills is a critical consideration as it stimulates customer-centric innovation and augments the value perceptions contextual to stakeholders, customers, supply chain players, venture capitalists, and brand managers (Webb et al., 2010). In this process, it is necessary for the government and social institutions to provide knowledge on contemporary business practices, and encourage the transfer of technology to the entrepreneurial guild. The CPIRT domain supports both the NEST and SUBADI domains by integrating consumer culture, personality of end users, social image, responsiveness to the needs, and timely introduction of applied innovative solutions to enhance the market outreach. CPIRT • Consumer culture • Personality • Image in society • Responsiveness to need • Timeliness • Market outreach SUBADI • Sustainable • Eco-entrepreneurship • Ubiquitous • Omnipresence in market • Business goals • Ambidextrous markets • Affordability • Cost-to-enterprise • Diffusion • Knowledge and skills • Innovation • Value perceptions

• Entrepreneurial Logic • Circular Reasoning

Applied innovative solutions • Cost-benefit-profit matrix • Market orientation • Exploring opportunities • Competitive business model • Transformational leadership • Resource acquisition and utilization • Alliances with key partners

NEST • Need-based innovation • Ecological entrepreneurship • Strategic thinking • Holistic transformation

Fig. 7.2 Entrepreneurial domains for logical growth framework (Source Author)

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It is challenging for entrepreneurs to integrate the NEST, SUBADI, and CPIRT domains due to the circular reasoning of entrepreneurs, which often drives entrepreneurs to choose a single domain to focus on in the context of CTR and CBP factors. Circular reasoning is a complex cognitive condition in which a conclusion is derived on the given options that are not materially different, but they commonly stimulate the cognitive argument or reasoning to adapt the appropriate strategy. The interaction of entrepreneurial logic and circular reasoning across the three entrepreneurial domains leads to generate applied innovative solutions based on cost–benefit–profit analysis by exploring opportunities and using a competitive business model. Entrepreneurial logic and circular reasoning can be streamlined through transformational leadership. The effective leadership helps entrepreneurial firms develop alliances with key partners, acquire resources, and organize systematic utilization of resources to contribute to the applied innovative solutions supported by the triadic entrepreneurial domains as discussed above (Zhu et al., 2017). The NEST concept encourages enterprises to engage stakeholders including the crowd in general, and customers in particular, to diffuse new ideas and transform values through frugal, incremental, and radical innovations to sustain the market competition and ensure long-term growth within the industry. The entrepreneurial sectors growing under the NEST concept in developing countries can be targeted by the government to introduce programs on strategic skill development and growth, by developing capabilities and competencies, to adapt to new technologies and carry out innovations to grow as unique market organizations (D’Angelo & Presutti, 2019). There is a wide scope for entrepreneurship to evolve within the context of NEST, and develop entrepreneurial strategies congruent with the changing market demand, consumer preferences, technology growth, and industrial engagements, and the transforming philosophy of public policies. Consequently, the NEST philosophy helps in reorienting the entrepreneurial traits to develop strategic decisions, measure various growth touch points, and stay responsive to the PNS factors within the affordable and adaptable technological domains. The NEST philosophy of entrepreneurship in convergence with the SUBADI model compliments to social and business attributes comprising Sustainable (eco-entrepreneurship), Ubiquitous (omnipresent), Business (ambidextrous markets), Affordable (cost-to-enterprises), Diffusion (knowledge and skills), and Innovation (value perceptions). Need-based entrepreneurship for strategic transformation can be nurtured across

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entrepreneurial sectors by embedding sustainable production process to encourage eco-entrepreneurship, and stay omnipresent in the ambidextrous markets including upstream and downstream consumer segments to operate on economies of scale by reducing the cost-to-enterprise (Hadid & Hamdan, 2022). The SUBADI model encourages diffusion of knowledge and skills for collective growth in consortium to develop value-based innovations, which enables consumers to experience ease of use and high perceived value within the competitive marketplace. The omnipresent business models in both upstream and downstream markets help entrepreneurs standardize the product design and manufacturing process to evolve in a competitive marketplace with the strategic scale of business. Controlling the cost and expanding the outreach to customers with innovative products at low prices are the major challenges in establishing the scale of business. Such business philosophy is congruent with the economies of scale concept, which helps the enterprises not only reduce the cost of manufacturing operations and overheads, but also lower the price at optimal volume of production. Micro, small and medium enterprises practicing SUBADI model have been uplifted to global markets through business alliances with large companies, as these enterprises focus on sustainable products with the omnipresent market foresight at low-cost to both firms and end users. Such frugal innovations have observed the win–win scenario for both the local enterprises and their sponsors for the sustainable, cost-effective, and potentially rewarding business models (von Janda et al., 2020). At the core of frugal innovations, local enterprises focused on customers are observing their basic needs to design the products. Such business philosophy is congruent with the NEST concept. In India, Godrej and Boyce company has conceived the concept of frugal innovation based on the NEST and SUBADI philosophy in developing the low-cost non-compressor refrigerator for the rural consumers, which costs approximately $70 USD. This product was branded as ChotuKool, which etymologically signifies a small cooling devise.1 This concept was innovated originally by traditional potters in India who developed double-walled earthen pots filled with water between the walls to preserve the cooked food for a short time.

1 For details see Euromonitor. https://www.euromonitor.com/article/frugal-innova tion-when-less-is-more-and-simplicity-sells, retrieved on October 29, 2022.

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The long-term entrepreneurial strategies should focus on introducing new products and services to match with the contemporary demand and providing services to customers to increase the business competitiveness and performance. The strategy central to long-term performance in business is to respond to the market changes and grow organically across geodemographic segments. The strategic orientation of enterprises needs to fit the socio-economic objective such as employment creation, export of products and services, and developing backward linkages to large industries (Zahoor et al., 2021). Continuous learning is one of the major requirements to stay strategic, innovate, and explore opportunities within the industry and market. As customers’ needs and expectations continue to evolve, MSMEs need to develop dynamic business models, which can be adjusted along with the market demand and customer preferences (Yunis et al., 2018). Applied Innovative Solutions NEST and SUBADI (Rajagopal & Rajagopal, 2023) entrepreneurial concepts tend to provide applied innovative solutions based on PNS factors and create value among stakeholders. These concepts educate entrepreneurs and stimulate quality of entrepreneurship to understand the psychosocial perceptions to develop applied innovative solutions. Such entrepreneurial goals help in commercializing the innovations in competitive markets and develop long-term relationship with stakeholders, key partners, and customers. Therefore, the entrepreneurial drive to develop applied innovative solutions is directly related to the PNS factors and market attractiveness within the industry. The major thrust of NEST and SUBADI entrepreneurial concepts is to develop sustainable products and services, and make them omni present across geodemographic market segments to induce rapid social, political, and economic transformation, nurture entrepreneurial creativity, and build stakeholder value. The applied entrepreneurial solutions need to be developed from the social and economic perspectives, which embed market potential and delivers solutions to the business-to-consumer and business-to-business market segments (Oh et al., 2022). Broadly, the SUBADI concept envelops social, competitive, and utilitarian perspectives of innovative products and services. Applied innovative solutions transform the consumption behavior within communities to overcome the complexities in production, services, and quality of life. Consequently, applied innovative ideas have

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become necessary in the marketplace today to meet the consumer demand prevailing in the society and cope with market challenges (Arora & Chong, 2018). The NEST and SUBADI entrepreneurial concepts stimulate both individual and group actions to co-create applied innovative solutions with high market potential. These factors are contextual to consumer Culture, consumer Personality, social Image, Responsiveness to needs, and Timeliness of outreach to market (CPIRT). The triadic effects of NEST, SUBADI, and CPIRT encourage entrepreneurs not only to explore market opportunities in the context of PNS factors, but also to develop servitization strategy to drive customer values for applied innovative solutions in the competitive marketplace. The triadic domains determine entrepreneurial performance by boosting and optimizing the product quality, revenue stream, and marketability of applied innovation products. Innovation and competitiveness in micro, small and medium enterprises are influenced by market drivers and through the policies of social and economic institutions. Collective intelligence and diffusion of knowledge from various entrepreneurial programs offered by social and government institutions help in developing skills in entrepreneurs in inculcating applied innovation ideas in the context of the challenges faced by the society. In general, NEST, SUBADI, and CPIRT elements contribute to transformative innovation strategies in the context of changing market ecosystems and social needs. In addition, the interrelated elements of these triadic domains also stimulate transformational leadership, which in turn stimulates entrepreneurs to acquire contemporary capabilities and competencies to create stakeholder values amidst changing market dynamics (Omri, 2020). Entrepreneurial innovations are commonly younger in age as compared to corporate innovations, which evolve over various incremental versions. Applied innovations are conceived as a dynamic force that motivates the social development perspective with the adoption of value-added activities to transform the social and economic value streams. However, organizational factors such as leadership and social proactiveness, and alliances and networks within the territorial spheres affect innovations and their launch in competitive marketplace (Ngo et al., 2019). The above-discussed domains significantly encourage entrepreneurs to develop both customer-centric and market-oriented strategies to link with effective supply chain networks and deliver applied innovative solutions to the business partners and consumers. However, the major challenge in integrating the NEST,

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SUBADI, and CPIRT domains with strategic entrepreneurial goals is to marginalize the adverse effects of CTR and CBP factors to contribute to the entrepreneurial performance. Therefore, these domains can be applied contextually to the entrepreneurial trade, industry, and market attributes to experiment the most appropriate ways to succeed in a competitive marketplace. Firms need to make structural adjustments in manufacturing and operations besides organizational design to adapt to the above entrepreneurial domains.

Entrepreneurial Performance Micro, small and medium enterprises, as learning organizations, acquire continuous knowledge and skills, which supports them to develop applied innovation solutions with high potential to commercialize innovative products. Therefore, re-orientation of entrepreneurial practices by updating knowledge and skills contributes to restore and foster entrepreneurial orientation towards market-led applied innovative solutions. The entrepreneurial orientation (EO) acts as the central factor for organizational performance to determine proactiveness in adapting to innovation and technology, exploring product-market opportunities, and discovering new ways to enter the competitive marketplace. EO reflects entrepreneur’s general strategic business abilities and posture towards frugal innovation to manifest the market-led business model. This distinction reflects the entrepreneurial behavior in the triadic model, which drives the entrepreneurial activities within the broad scope of social and economic philosophy of business (Poudel et al., 2019). Most enterprises, which evolve out of family business, develop a capsule business design to perform multiple activities within the complex operational grid, which drives these enterprises to stay in niche. The resource limitations, conventional leadership, and lack of agility in organizational design restrict these enterprises from expanding their market outreach and improve performance. Consequently, they develop an entrepreneurial cocoon and sustain with the ‘capsule design’, in which leader-oriented business culture combines with limited capital and human resources. Under such conditions, entrepreneurs tend to adapt conventional work culture with multitasking and centralized decisions. Therefore, these enterprises engage in conventional business models with a discrete focus on product-market orientation, which makes them risky ventures in the dynamic marketplace. However, proactiveness to innovation, logical and

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safe entry into the competitive markets, and exploring the demand-led product opportunities could drive these enterprises to survive in the adverse effects of market competition and stay beyond the predetermined niche (Wang et al., 2020). The performance of micro, small and medium enterprises can be improved by encouraging them to develop their operational model by linking the elements of business canvas, identifying key resources (resource acquisition and utilization), focusing on key activities (marketoriented operations), and developing alliances with key partners (tactical and strategic) on production, innovation, distribution, technology, and capital resources. In addition, the micro, small and medium enterprises need to lower the cost structure and develop effective supply chain network across consumer segment to create value proposition and customer relationship. Such linear business operations would help entrepreneurs to strengthen the principal revenue stream and create alternate revenue streams to mitigate the risks. The public policies in developing countries such as identifying enterprises in special economic zones (SEZ) and promoting them as export processing and export-oriented units (EOU) help these enterprises increase their market outreach and create stakeholder values. The public policy supporting enterprises under SEZ offers capital subsidies and benefits on production, and locate their business in specific zones away from unregulated market competition. Consequently, the EOUs are motivated to explore export competitiveness to market their products. The enterprises operating under these public policies are benefitted significantly in India in consumer electronics, information technology, and ethnic products to explore and outreach international markets. Similar policies in China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand have also benefitted local entrepreneurs to target their products in international markets.

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Index

A ACCA, 10, 81 Afforestation, 104 Agro-waste management, 105 Anand Milk Union Limited (AMUL), 92–94 Awareness, 1, 10, 11, 18, 33–35, 45, 69, 70, 81, 94, 98, 100, 103, 110, 138 B Biogenic silica, 105, 107 Biomimicry, 67, 107 Blueprint, 9, 18, 64, 65, 69, 82, 84, 113 Bottom-of-the-pyramid, 2–5, 8, 10, 12–14, 18–21, 31, 35, 37, 55, 59, 60, 69, 89, 97, 123, 137 Bubble-and-burst, 8 Business growth, 2, 12, 18, 43, 55, 61, 64, 139, 153, 158 Business model, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13–15, 20, 21, 32, 34, 35, 40,

43, 54, 55, 59–63, 65, 66, 76, 78, 79, 88, 89, 91–93, 100–104, 109, 111, 113, 119, 122–133, 138, 145, 146, 148, 152, 158, 161–163, 165 Business-to-business (B-to-B), 13, 40, 83, 89, 99, 102, 106, 111, 119, 121, 124, 125, 145, 151, 163 Business-to-consumers (B-to-C), 40, 83, 89, 99, 102, 124, 125, 151, 163

C Capabilities and competencies, 4, 7, 32, 35, 36, 41, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 87, 88, 123, 129, 138, 161, 164 China, 33, 37, 56, 166 Circular economy, 6, 14, 20, 45, 97–101 Cleaner entrepreneurship, 2, 3, 12, 19, 53, 117

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Rajagopal, Towards Cleaner Entrepreneurship, Palgrave Studies of Entrepreneurship and Social Challenges in Developing Economies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24884-9

171

172

INDEX

Cocreation, 7, 8, 11, 20, 30, 62, 78, 80, 83, 87, 88, 97, 104, 117, 119, 131, 132, 146, 150 Co-designing, 11 Coevolution, 11, 132 Cognitive resonance, 3 Collective intelligence, 7, 10, 14, 39, 41, 42, 47, 53, 60, 62, 66, 68, 76, 78, 82–84, 87–90, 99, 101, 108, 120, 123, 127, 131, 135, 145, 148, 152, 153, 157, 164 Community commons, 12, 117, 121 Companies, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8–13, 31–33, 35, 38, 55, 56, 66, 68–71, 78, 80, 81, 86, 88, 93, 103–107, 111, 126, 128, 129, 131, 137, 153, 162 Conscious consumerism, 21, 46 Consortium entrepreneurship, 67 Constructivism, 15 Cost-benefit-profit (CBP), 17, 84, 85, 88, 109, 132, 150, 154, 161, 165 Cost-time-risk (CTR), 7, 17, 84, 85, 89, 103, 109, 132, 146, 148, 150, 154, 158, 161, 165 Council for Advancement of Peoples Action and Rural Technology (CAPART), 90, 91, 119 CPIRT, 159–161, 164, 165 Crowd-based model, 4, 21, 55, 63, 78, 118, 122, 130 Crowdfunding, 18, 102, 108, 117, 121, 132, 133 Crowdsourcing, 8, 10, 18, 20, 66, 82–84, 89, 101, 117, 120, 131 Customer-centric, 17, 20, 42, 46, 56, 59, 60, 64, 67, 83, 102, 124, 126, 127, 129, 133, 137, 138, 145, 150, 152, 154, 160, 164 Cyclicality, 3, 98, 100

D Dark-kitchen, 14, 15 Decision-making, 3, 4, 12, 16, 33, 55, 56, 64, 69, 71, 78, 87, 88, 93, 121, 122, 125, 127, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138, 148, 150 Design ergonomy, 86 Design-to-market, 21, 30, 32, 38, 93, 122, 124, 127, 128, 131, 133, 138, 153 Design-to-society, 18, 21, 93, 127, 128, 131, 133, 134, 138 Design-to-value, 18, 21, 32, 93, 127, 128, 131, 133, 138 Disruption, 12, 13, 65, 82, 112, 123, 124, 128, 132, 153 Domains, 2, 19, 20, 33, 37, 53, 76, 80, 81, 104, 120, 121, 124, 149–151, 159–161, 164, 165 E Economic, 1–7, 10–14, 16, 19, 20, 29, 30, 32, 35–38, 40, 42–45, 47, 56–60, 70, 75, 78, 82, 84, 86, 89–91, 93, 97, 99, 104, 109, 117, 119, 132, 134, 155, 157, 163, 164 Ecosystem, 1–4, 6, 7, 10, 14, 16, 20, 29, 32, 33, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 58, 59, 62, 63, 69, 70, 77–81, 83, 85, 89, 90, 92, 97, 103, 106, 112, 117, 118, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 145, 146, 150, 152, 158, 164 Education, 9, 10, 12, 29, 75, 89–91, 102, 108, 109, 111, 118, 120, 128 Emerging markets, 2, 10, 12, 44, 103, 118, 123 Employee engagement, 3, 4, 17, 21, 22, 56, 84, 87, 88, 128, 132

INDEX

Employee motivation, 3, 4 Entrepreneurial ego, 4 Entrepreneurial mindset, 4, 14–16, 69, 129, 138 Entrepreneurial orientation (EO), 165 Entrepreneurs, 1–3, 8, 10, 11, 13–18, 20, 21, 30–33, 35, 36, 39, 41, 43, 46–48, 54, 56–60, 63, 64, 68, 70, 75, 76, 78–83, 85, 86, 89–91, 93, 98, 103, 117–119, 121–128, 130, 131, 135, 136, 139, 145, 146, 148, 150–153, 158–161, 163, 164, 166 Enviropreneurial Entrepreneurship, 108 Export-Oriented Units (EOU), 37, 166

F Family business firms, 4, 68, 82, 83, 90 Family risk, 4 Farm and non-farm, 8, 33, 36, 38, 39, 59, 106, 119, 125, 157 Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), 8, 154 Financial risk, 4 For-profit, 11, 135

173

I India, 4, 5, 8, 11, 18, 33, 37, 45, 55–57, 68–71, 81, 90, 92, 94, 103, 107, 109–111, 113, 119, 128, 138, 156, 157, 162, 166 Individualistic decision-making, 4 Innovation disruptive, 15, 36, 76, 146, 150, 152–155, 157 frugal, 13, 31, 35–37, 39, 40, 43, 58, 62, 82, 98, 123, 150, 162, 165 reverse, 9, 21, 32, 35, 61, 62, 68, 71, 132, 150, 156, 157 K Knowledge-intensive enterprises (KIE), 19, 42–44 Korean entrepreneurship, 33

G Geo-demographic segments, 7, 12, 33, 35, 37, 43, 104, 137, 163 GitHub facilities, 83 Green entrepreneurship, 1, 5, 10, 12, 13, 20, 21, 30 Green products, 1, 6–8, 10

L Leader-member exchange, 54, 87, 128 Leadership collective, 3, 22, 77, 87 conventional, 68, 90, 165 family, 3, 64, 87, 125 transformational, 5, 20, 30, 54, 69, 77, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 94, 97, 126, 131, 135, 147, 161, 164 Learning-oriented, 4 Low-cost, 1, 5, 7, 14, 15, 31, 35, 39, 41–43, 69–71, 83, 86, 94, 99, 102–107, 111–113, 123, 131, 132, 134–136, 146, 150, 152, 156, 162 Lowsumerism, 100

H Hub and spoke model, 38, 86 Hybrid organizations, 31, 87

M Manufacturing, 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15, 18, 20, 21, 30–32, 36, 39,

174

INDEX

42, 45, 46, 59, 61, 64, 65, 68, 75, 79, 91, 97, 99–105, 118–121, 123, 125, 131, 135, 137–139, 146, 147, 152, 154, 162, 165 Marketing, 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 15–18, 20, 21, 31, 36, 39–43, 46–48, 56, 57, 59–61, 64–66, 68–70, 75, 76, 79–81, 90–94, 97–103, 106–109, 118, 119, 121, 123–125, 128–131, 133, 134, 136–139, 146, 147, 152, 155, 156, 158 Micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 15, 18, 45, 67, 106, 108, 133, 138, 157, 163 Multinational companies, 70, 94, 156 N Need-based ecological strategic transformation (NEST), 158–164 New-generation entrepreneurship, 2 New product management, 153 Not-for-profit, 11 O Organizational culture, 3, 126, 132, 137, 150 Organizational growth, 3, 4, 21 Organizations, 1–5, 8, 16, 18, 31, 32, 35, 45, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 75, 87, 88, 91–94, 111, 113, 119, 123, 125, 127, 133, 136–138, 148, 149, 157, 158, 161, 165 social, 2, 3, 8, 64 technology-led, 3, 91 P PACT, 77, 92

Participatory entrepreneurial appraisal, 8 Patanjali, 8 People-oriented, 4, 43 Political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal (PESTEL), 21, 30, 101, 103 Problems, needs, and solutions (PNS), 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 15, 16, 20, 35, 39, 40, 53, 54, 64, 69, 78–80, 82, 89, 108, 117, 120, 131, 132, 134, 136, 145, 146, 150, 153, 154, 161, 163, 164 Profit-oriented businesses, 11, 105 Profit-with-purpose, 5, 40, 42, 80, 128, 132, 133 Public policies, 2, 3, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 21, 29, 31, 35, 39, 41, 44–46, 59, 60, 62, 67, 69, 71, 75, 78, 80, 81, 86, 89, 90, 92, 98, 102, 106, 108, 113, 118, 119, 121–123, 132, 148, 149, 151, 157–159, 161, 166 Public-private partnership, 11, 32, 35, 60, 62, 63, 106, 121, 122, 135 Purpose-oriented, 4

R Resistance economic, 2, 59 political, 60 social, 2 Reverse accountability, 6, 13, 19, 92, 121, 123, 127, 138, 147–149 Rice husk ash (RHA), 70, 103, 107

S Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 18, 119

INDEX

Self-help, 18, 31, 35, 45, 70, 90, 113, 117, 121, 128, 149, 157 Servitization, 7, 102, 147, 154, 164 3S factors social consciousness, 3, 20 social persistence, 3, 20 social values, 3, 20 Silviculture, 36, 104, 105, 107, 110, 112 SMART, 78 Social environment, 8–10, 118 Social needs, 1, 5, 8, 18, 31, 39, 101, 104, 109, 127, 133, 158, 164 Social networks, 2, 10, 76, 82 Social values, 1–3, 11, 30, 31, 54, 55, 60, 92, 94, 98, 108, 112, 117, 131–135 Socio-political, 1, 44, 45, 60 Special economic zones (SEZ), 37, 166 Stakeholders, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17–22, 29–31, 34, 35, 39, 40, 42–45, 54, 55, 62, 63, 67, 69, 70, 76, 78, 81, 83, 84, 87, 89, 90, 92–94, 97, 102–104, 118–122, 125–128, 130–137, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 158–160, 163, 164, 166 SUBADI, 159–165

175

Supply chain, 1, 14, 17, 21, 65, 67, 86, 90, 98, 99, 101, 131, 154, 156, 160, 164, 166 Sustainability-led, 6, 31, 32, 35, 36, 42, 104, 108, 129, 137, 146 Sustainable, 1–14, 16, 18–21, 29, 31–35, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 53, 54, 57, 60, 64, 70, 71, 84, 92, 97–113, 117–119, 121–124, 127, 128, 138, 139, 152, 153, 155, 159, 161–163 Sustainable development, 4–6, 29, 39, 45, 91, 118 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 4, 11, 19, 29, 30 Systems thinking, 19, 53–55, 127, 148 T Technological complexities, 1, 119 V Ventures, 4–6, 9, 10, 15, 30–32, 35, 37, 48, 60–66, 80, 87, 107, 118, 121, 132–138, 151, 160, 165 W Well-being, 20, 29, 42, 43, 76, 77, 97, 104, 106