The what and why

What is the challenge?

As the world’s population continues to increase, per capita GDP is projected to result in a doubling of global material consumption. Many countries and regions already face unprecedented social and environmental crises and disruptive events. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals identifies 17 critical grand challenges for the 21st century that urgently need to be solved, including amongst others climate change, access to clean water and sanitation, democratization, access to healthcare, clean energy, and the elimination of poverty.

The impact of these crises and disruptive events can no longer be ignored and require fundamental changes to our environmental, economic and social systems. The current unsustainable ‘take-make-waste’ market economies need to be replaced by circular and sustainable societies that seek to balance social, environmen-tal and economic systems. In a circular economy, the intertwined relationships between economic, ecological, and social systems are balanced and preserved. We need to change from economic growth and maximizing profits at all costs to sustainable well-being and balancing the interests of people, planet and profits.

The transition from a linear, fossil-fuel based and market economy into a circular, green and sustainable society with well-being for all is the main challenge of the modern world economy.

Why sustainable entrepreneurship?

Sustainable entrepreneurs address the grand challenges and are therefore key in the transition towards a circular economy. Sustainable entrepreneurs are different from mainstream entrepre-neurs. Mainstream entrepreneurs focus on profit-maximization for a few shareholders at all costs.

Sustainable entrepreneurs are sustainable opportunity-oriented individuals that generate new sustainable products, services, and production processes. They create new business models that simultaneously balance and preserve ecological, social and economic goals, resulting in sustainable well-being for current and future generations. Sustainable entrepreneurs offer the creative potential needed to save planet earth and to develop a circular economy.

Sustainable entrepreneurship heralds a radically new and inno-vative paradigm. Sustainable entrepreneurs take social impact instead of profit maximization as the point of departure. Sustain-able entrepreneurship fosters sustainable opportunity recognition processes and the start of sustainable enterprises with sustain-ability-specific values, traits, knowledge, motivation, competen-cies, and passion. Sustainable entrepreneurship highlights the importance of radical innovations as the game changers that create systemic changes in societies. Sustainable entrepreneurs design and implement new business models with the triple bottom line as the benchmark for how they add value, approach strategy and organization, utilize networking, build alliances and position themselves in the market. Sustainable entrepreneurship replaces the imperative of economic growth by dimensions of well-being beyond profit maximization such as psychological well-being, health, time use, education, cultural diversity, resilience, good governance, and community vitality.

Why a Centre for Sustainable Entrepreneurship?

The Centre for Sustainable Entrepreneurship in a Circular Econ-omy fosters the successful design, implementation, and man-agement of sustainable entrepreneurship and the transition to a circular economy because:

1. It educates new generations of sustainable entrepreneurs by means of a new academic master of sciences degree program for students;
2. It generates new and state-of-the art academic knowledge by means of transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and multidiscipli-nary research lines directly relevant for social communities;
3. It offers new and ongoing inspiration for regional, national and international communities and stakeholders that want to change their organizations and regions into successful sustain-able enterprises and circular economies.

The Centre for Sustainable Entrepreneurship in a Circular Economy is all about sustainable collaboration across all societal realms. The joint efforts of students, scholars, business leaders, policy-makers and citizens result in new solutions that will make sustainable entrepreneurship and the transition to a circular econ-omy successful