Barriers to Green Entrepreneurship: An ISM-Based Investigation

Green entrepreneurship is a novel sustainability term. A strategy has recently been put forward to make a business greener by minimizing the harmful impact on the environment and committing to sustainability while maintaining financial imperishability. However, some barriers prevent its implementation to its full potential. This study aims at investigating such barriers following the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach for analyzing relationships among them and for their prioritization, for the effective construction of green entrepreneurship. The study revealed that collaboration among stakeholders of business activities is vital to green entrepreneurship. Results also show that R&D and technology are foundational to overcoming other barriers, such as the costs associated with green initiatives, lack of knowledge and subjective awareness in the market, shortage of investors and involvement of private sectors, government regulations, cultural differences, dominating industries, lack of incentive and support mechanism, and bureaucracy. Subsequently, the results indicated that overcoming these barriers will enable us to change the short-term mindset of investors towards green entrepreneurship. Implications of this study include using the revealed set of barriers and their modeled relationships for policymaking as well as the development of better targeted and more effective strategies to overcome these barriers, enabling its implementation to its full potential.