Sustainable Entrepreneurs Shaping Their...

Sustainable entrepreneurs are confronted with multiple institutional logics while they build their financially viable business and create social and environmental value. Utilizing and responding to institutional plurality is a key task for such entrepreneurs. Yet, current efforts lack knowledge on how sustainable entrepreneurs blend multiple logics to shape their business models. To address this, the article utilizes the institutional logics perspective in conjunction with the componential approach to business models. By analyzing a longitudinal in-depth case study of a sustainable entrepreneur, the article provides insights into how a shift of salience of logics induces a change process where the entrepreneur engages in reorientation according to the guiding principles of the newly salient logic. The entrepreneur changes his commitment, goals, and practices to meet the new demands, to carry out the change and to integrate the newly salient logic into the business model. This, in turn, results in enhancement, compromise, or maintenance of business model functions. This article contributes to sustainable entrepreneurship and business modeling research in revealing the underlying mechanism of change processes under institutional plurality. In addition, it has practical implications including ways for entrepreneurs to engage such change processes and rethinking the supportive roles of incubators and grant systems in business modeling under institutional plurality.