Exploring entrepreneurship related to the sustainable development goals - mapping new venture activities with semi-automated content analysis

It is widely agreed that humanity faces major sustainability challenges that require immediate action. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are the most recent political call for action in this direction. In this study, we examine what role entrepreneurship in Germany plays in achieving the German SDGs. Thus, we pick up the discussion on sustainable entrepreneurship as a lever for change and search for empirical evidence that entrepreneurs in Germany identify and develop opportunities along the entire SDG spectrum. For our study, we examined a total of 193 venture competitions in Germany, collected data on a total of 588 rewarded ventures and used a semi-automated content analysis process to allocate those ventures to the main 17 SDGs based on their business activities. With our work offer a scalable and repeatable approach to map SDG related activity of new ventures, and we provide a detailed analysis of Germany's entrepreneurship landscape along the 17 SDGs. We found a very heterogeneous distribution of entrepreneurial activities along the goals, but also significant correlations between multiple goals that are frequently addressed jointly. Contrasting entrepreneurial activity along the SDGs with the national overall SDG performance of Germany we identified multiple SDGs that are rarely addressed by entrepreneurs despite strong needs for improvements. The identified patterns constitute a starting point for additional research on the potential of SDG related entrepreneurship and they direct policy makers and entrepreneurs where they can make the largest contribution to the SDGs. (c) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.