Abstract
Nowadays, sustainable and responsible entrepreneurship seem to represent the most important goals targeted by the economic business environment at a worldwide scale. In addition, creativity, innovation, and intellectual capital are seen as drivers for organizational performance, particularly in the context of ensuring the right balance in terms of market competition, in the quest for retaining different forms of competitive advantages. Nonetheless, although the general vision of maximizing profit, in the case of producers, and of enhancing satisfaction, in the case of consumers, still governs the economic rules specific to any marketplace, there is a general concern for the future generations, as well as ecology and environmental wellbeing. Under these circumstances, at least for now, all the answers seem to lie in the entrepreneurs' ability to act much more mature, liable, competent, proficient, and efficient, while managing at a higher and improved level of performance their business operations.
TopIntroduction
Investigating sustainable and responsible entrepreneurial strategies are a continuing concern in a business environment dominated by ecological features and “green performance”. The changes experienced by the economic business environment over the past decade remain unprecedented due to the abundance of innovative and creative sources, among which human and intellectual capital seem to distinguish themselves throughout new and improved qualities.
However, these rapid changes are having a serious effect on the entrepreneurs’ managerial choices concerning the types of “green” entrepreneurial strategies to be used, starting from the idea that the most recent tendencies lead towards superiority, market domination and excellence on the marketplace. There is increasing concern that some entrepreneurs are being disadvantaged by the new strategies derived from more responsible and sustainable business activities, since being creative, innovative and “going green”, means always relying on the least predictable as well as the most risky change management strategies in order to properly serve, on the one hand, the ecological and environmental goals, and, on the other hand, the well-being of the next generations. Thus, despite the safety and efficiency of the new sustainable business strategies, it should be pointed out that some of the business activities willing to “go green” might suffer from several major drawbacks, such as: insufficiently tested technologies that may still harm the environment and people – maybe even more than past technologies; lack of funds for investments in business development and activity redesign; and inadequately prepared human resources capable to implement the new technologies and to make use of the new entrepreneurial strategies. Questions have been raised about the potential business and environmental risks that can occur in the event of making some managerial mistakes in addressing and adapting to change, since there are already far too many examples of entrepreneurs failing on the marketplace – case in which no second chance was offered for them. But, at the same time, success seems to have brought great rewards to the brave entrepreneurs relying on creativity, innovation, and human and intellectual capital, which chose to invest in sustainable and environmental responsible businesses.
To date there has been little agreement on what entrepreneurs should focus on in their businesses in order to succeed on the long-run on the marketplace, since it looks more and more a matter of opportunity seeking, luck, pure intuition and risk affinity rather than well-structured strategies.
This paper focuses mainly on the authors’ perspectives concerning the approaches to sustainable and responsible entrepreneurship, with a deep interest in creativity, innovation and intellectual capital as drivers for organizations’ performance, in the attempt to offer answers to several key questions:
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What does sustainable and responsible entrepreneurship mean today and which are the connections with the “green movement”?
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What roles do creativity, innovation, and human and intellectual capital play in the organizations’ performance and can specialists consider the idea of “green performance”?
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Can an inclusive model of excellence and “green performance” be proposed in the case of Romania?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Green Competition: A specific form of competition that is focused on the ecological side of the companies’ strategies and that refers to a green promotion strategy of the companies’ goods and services, which is focused on achieving precise entrepreneurial objectives, based on the organizations’ promotional mix.
Freedom of Competition: Has its limits in honest and sustainable commercial practices, which automatically implies that all economic agents are obliged to respect a minimum of morality in order to enforce the loyalty characteristic to competitiveness; the increasing frequency of abuses and anticompetitive commercial forms in the daily struggle for economic power, market domination and performance supremacy, has made the issue of respecting and defending real competition subject to numerous legal, sustainable, and environmental-friendly regulations and procedures; competition regulations have the power of reducing business risks, on the one matter, and of facilitating entrepreneurs the possibility to make clean profits and be part of “green performance” processes, on the other matter.
Green Consumer: Focuses on the competitive market economic laws that state that the limited resources to meet individual and social needs must be efficiently used, while the market should be regulated by authorities in order to stimulate production so that the behavior of producers becomes less oriented towards maximizing profit and more dedicated to optimizing consumption and maximizing the satisfaction of consumer needs, in accordance with the environment restrictions and regulations.