Entrepreneurship for biodiversity conservation: Revealing pathways for impact based on the IPBES transformative change assessment

The accelerating biodiversity crisis demands urgent, system-wide transformation. Entrepreneurship, recognized as a driver of social, environmental and economic change, appears relevant to this challenge. However, entrepreneurship literature has largely neglected biodiversity conservation. Top entrepreneurship journals have published only six articles directly addressing biodiversity conservation in the past decade. This neglect is surprising given entrepreneurship research’s interest in impact, public good provision and addressing grand societal challenges. The absence of conservation-focused research limits the relevance of entrepreneurship insights for conservation practice and overlooks opportunities for theoretical development and cross-disciplinary action-research.

This manuscript (currently under review) bridges conservation and entrepreneurship by applying a leading, evidence-based framework from conservation science to assess entrepreneurship literature. We use the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Transformative Change Assessment (O’Brien et. al., 2025) to examine how flagship articles from entrepreneurship address, or overlook, the systemic challenges to transformation. The IPBES framework identified five such challenges: relations of domination, inequality, inadequate policies and institutions, unsustainable consumption and production, and limited access to technology and innovation. Specifically, we scrutinize how Markman et al. (2019)’s impact entrepreneurship and Vedula et al. (2022)’s entrepreneurship for the public good – respond to these five challenges.

Our synthesis reveals disciplinary strengths and critical gaps in the entrepreneurship literature. Entrepreneurship research provides valuable insights on institutional change and technology diffusion. However, it largely overlooks the domination of people and nature, economic and political inequalities, and unsustainable consumption and production patterns. We illustrate how these critical gaps constrain realization of transformative pathways by deconstructing two entrepreneurship studies of conservation initiatives. Drawing on conservation social sciences, particularly power theories and political ecology, we highlight theoretical insights and methodological tools that can address these gaps and strengthen entrepreneurship’s contribution to biodiversity conservation.

Our findings demonstrate that conservation science frameworks can guide entrepreneurship scholarship toward more contextually grounded and societally relevant contributions to biodiversity conservation, and transformative change more broadly.

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Markman, G. D., et al. (2019). Academy of Management Perspectives, 33(4), 371–382. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.2019.0130

O’Brien, K., et al. (2025). IPBES Transformative Change Assessment: Summary for Policymakers. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.11382230

Vedula, S., et al. (2022). Academy of Management Annals, 16(1), 391–425. https://doi.org/10.5465/annals.2019.0143