Ecological Entrepreneurship: Main Trends and Stages of the Studies Development

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to conduct an analysis of the main researches on ecological entrepreneurship (ecopreneurship) to define the stages of its development, main trends and topical research areas. Academic papers published in the peer-reviewed journals in the period from 1997 till 2015 were used to conduct the analysis. The papers were searched in the International data bases of articles, such as Scopus, Web of Science and EBSCO using the following key words: environmental entrepreneurship, green entrepreneurship, ecoentrepreneurship, ecopreneurship and green-green business. The articles, falling within the domain of the entrepreneurship and management, in which the ecological entrepreneurship is either the main topic of research or one of the components of the studied facts, were selected for the investigation objectives. The sources were distributed into the following sections: theoretical research and empirical research. The most part of research in ecopreneurship may be characterized as empirical studies, based on the qualitative methods. The number of theoretical and conceptual studies of the ecopreneurship is significantly low. The number of papers discussing the empirical testing of the formulated hypotheses by the quantitative methods of analysis is very few. The analysis of the literature suggests that the development of the ecopreneurship theory is at the emerging stage of the scientific theory, which is characterized by formulating of the open matters, using qualitative methods for the empirical research, and by the assumptions about the development of the theory. Only English-language publications, full texts of which were accessible in the International data bases Scopus, Web of Science and EBSCO, were used. The investigations of the external social and economic, political, legislative contexts, suppressing or encouraging the ecopreneurship intentions as well as the diversity of those conditions in different countries, were suggested as the trend for the future research. The paper is the source of the systemic information about the current condition of the ecological entrepreneurship investigations and can be useful both for the researchers and for the ecopreneurs.