The promise of entrepreneurial ecosystems for sustainability transitions

Although the entrepreneurial ecosystem framework has significantly impacted scholarly debates about place and entrepreneurship, its conventional focus on productive entrepreneurship and economic growth often neglects the social and environmental impacts of entrepreneurial ecosystems and their entrepreneurship outputs. We argue that sustainable entrepreneurs can act as pivotal agents for entrepreneurial ecosystem change and sustainability transitions, yet they face unique challenges within existing and transitioning socio-technical regimes, including institutional voids, liminality, and the heavy burden of simultaneously developing sustainable technologies and business models. Drawing from different strands of literature that situate sustainable entrepreneurs within geographical space, we emphasize that achieving sustainability transitions require system-level reconfigurations of production, consumption, and overall behavioral and institutional change. Building from the contributions to this special issue, we propose a research agenda focused on how to move beyond "wishful thinking" about improving sustainability to fulfill the promise of transitioning the evolutionary trajectories of EEs toward more sustainable futures.