Comprehensive and multifaceted perspectives on sustainability, urban studies, and entrepreneurship

Plain English SummaryWhile practitioners discuss challenges in cities that sustainable entrepreneurship could address, researchers tend to look at these questions based on their expertise in entrepreneurship, sustainability, or urban studies or, at best, merging two disciplines. Nevertheless, phenomena at the intersection of sustainability, cities, and entrepreneurship are highly complex and call all disciplines involved to devise solutions for current challenges. We provide an overview of the current achievements of research on sustainable entrepreneurship in cities and explain how research should be conducted to ensure transdisciplinary research that offers valuable implications for policymakers. Involving ecosystem actors in understanding challenges and designing solutions that contribute to creating value for the sustainability transition is then key to achieving the common objective of making life in cities and on the one planet we have worth living. While practitioners discuss the phenomena of sustainability, cities, and entrepreneurship, such as living labs and smart cities, alongside sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems at length, researchers tend to reduce the complexity by considering these phenomena from the perspective of one discipline or by merging two research disciplines at best. This study intends to provide guidance on what is required for the emergence of a transdisciplinary research stream of sustainability, urban studies, and entrepreneurship. By applying design science involving practitioners and scientific experts, we designed a relevant and rigorous future research agenda that considered phenomena, research design, and theoretical foundations. Starting from the basis that sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems are promising, the agenda integrates the knowledge base and establishes a multifaceted and comprehensive perspective on sustainable entrepreneurship in cities. Furthermore, implementing the research agenda has strong practical implications for realizing the common vision of a transition that ensures the quality of life on Earth.