10371: From Fragmentation to Integration: A Meta-Synthesis and Roadmap for Impact Entrepreneurship

The intertwined nature of societal grand challenges requires entrepreneurship scholarship that integrates environmental, social, and governance concerns. However, existing literature tends to treat these concerns separately through environmental entrepreneurship, sustainable entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and responsible entrepreneurship. An impact entrepreneurship perspective holds the potential to bridge scholarship that focuses on improving the world through new venture creation and growth. Our research theoretically advances the nascent domain of impact entrepreneurship, which considers market alongside environmental, social, and governance principles, by adopting a meta-synthesis approach to integrate disparate yet related literature streams. Through the meta-synthesis approach, we qualitatively analyze and synthesize 40 literature reviews spanning 15 years to develop a theory of impact entrepreneurship. We build a theoretical framework that organizes the causes, processes, and consequences of impact in entrepreneurial contexts. We contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by creating bridges among conversations that focus on impact creation, capture, distribution, and destruction either implicitly or explicitly, thereby building a new cohesive impact entrepreneurship perspective and a roadmap for future research.

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