Entrepreneurship 568                                                                                                            Green Entrepreneurship

GREEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP

INTRODUCTION

Today, the ethical high ground is held by those companies which appreciate environmental and social responsibilities. Especially in the Western countries that are prosperous and educated, there are increasingly interest by the society in environmental responsibilities. The entrepreneurs who are able to cultivate this trend and create organisations based on environmental awareness are considered innovators. They challenge conventions and create new arrangements of people and resources (Baden, 2000) Some examples of companies that has successfully achieved competitive advantage by going green are Body Shop of UK and Tom of Maine’s in USA. Some companies also shifts to more environmental friendly solution to their products. These companies, that are also called “green differentiates” (Andersen, 2000), are those who take advantage green marketing as their sales parameter. Toyota is one of them in which they promote their cars to contain low dangerous exhaust fumes that are safer to communities.

Green business is defined as a business that operates in ways that solve — rather than cause — environmental and social problems. These businesses adopt principles, policies and practices that improve the quality of life for their customers, employees, communities, and the planet. (Co-op America, 2001) Green entrepreneurship is about integration of techno and environment knowledge integrated with economic issue to create valuable innovation to society.  In simplest term, the vision of green entrepreneurship is for environmental issues may be integrated into business practices profitably and that a strong environmental profile eventually will become a market standard that is valued by their customers.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the opportunities and the advantages of entrepreneurs to adopt environmental friendly practices. Some barriers and ways to the implementation part of the practice are also outline in the body of this essay.

DRIVERS OF GREEN ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Bansal and Roth (2000) have identified motives for corporate "greening," such as regulatory compliance, competitive advantage, stakeholder pressures, ethical concerns, critical events, and top management initiative. One of the major driver for green entrepreneurship is the increasing economic challenges that intensify business competition force companies to find better ways to do business and strategize. The new knowledge society also act as a prominent driver to green entrepreneurship phenomena. People are becoming more and more aware of the bad impact of the traditional ways of doing business to the environment, thus they shifts to value environmentalism efforts. As a result of both main driver, companies strive towards building new form of competition based on knowledge, one of them being green entrepreneurship.

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES

        The current state of economy and environmental problems present few opportunities for entrepreneurs who are willing to innovate “green products” or apply “green solutions” in their enterprise. Some ways that small businesses impact on the environment include their usage of raw material; engagement in recycling activities, consumption of energy, water and fuel resources; the packaging they give to the consumer. (Schaper, 2002) Many people argue that environmental awareness is something that is expensive to do and is far from the reality of the economic of a firm. However, a construction company by the name of Turner Corporation have proved otherwise. The company brought about a new meaning of ‘sustainable construction’, which Atkisson (2003) called a contradiction in terms at first. “Construction of new buildings is one of the least sustainable activities currently under way on planet Earth” (Atkisson, 2003). Yet, change is happening at a large scale given out by one Turner corporation’s project. The project was the Rose Garden project, in which they as the contractor agreed to implement a state-of-the-art recycling program. To date, the program has recycled over 95 percent of the construction waste – nearly 45,000 tones of concrete, steel, gypsum, paper and other materials, at a saving of more than $150,000 compared to what landfill disposal would have cost.

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        The example shows that going green could be a competitive strategy to be pursued by a business. The construction company above lead the industry and set new standards for construction and recycling and by doing that, Turner Corp is helping to create the market and build corporate image, and save cost, and even they don’t have to be paid with a great price. The other potential advantage of environmental based strategy are described by Andersen (2000) as: sales parameter, image/stakeholder relations, ahead of environmental regulation, human resource management and lower production costs.

Business opportunities for green companies are greater ...

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