Sustainability Standards and Stakeholder Engagement: Lessons From Carbon Markets

Stakeholders play an increasingly active role in private governance, including development of standards for measuring sustainability. Building on prior studies focused on standards and stakeholder engagement, we use an innovation management theoretical lens to compare stakeholder engagement and standards developed in two carbon markets: the Climate Action Reserve and the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism. We develop and test hypotheses regarding how different processes of stakeholder engagement in standard development affect the number, identity, and age of stakeholders involved, as well as the variation and quality of the resulting standards. In doing so, we contribute to the growing literature on stakeholder engagement in developing sustainability standards

Lessons from the world’s largest market-based approach to lowering co2 emissions

The Paris agreement can learn from the political idiosyncrasies of the Kyoto protocol's 'Clean Development Mechanism', write Hans Rawhouser, Shon Hiatt and Michael Cumming

Lessons from the world’s largest market-based approach to lowering co2 emissions

The Paris agreement can learn from the political idiosyncrasies of the Kyoto protocol’s ‘Clean Development Mechanism’, write Hans Rawhouser, Shon Hiatt and Michael Cummings

Social Impact Measurement: Current Approaches and Future Directions for Social Entrepreneurship Research

Despite the importance of social impact to social entrepreneurship research, standards for measuring an organization’s social impact are underdeveloped on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We identify a sample of 71 relevant papers from leading (FT50) business journals that examine, conceptually or empirically, the measurement of social impact. We first describe the breadth of definitions, data sources, and operationalizations of social impact. Based on this analysis, we generate a typology of four approaches to conceptualizing social impact, which we use to organize insights and recommendations regarding improved measurement of the social impact of entrepreneurial ventures

Institution Building in Nascent Markets: Lessons from the Carbon Offset Market

In order to compete in nascent markets, an infrastructure of institutions that support economic exchange needs to be built in order. Little is known about whether and to what extent benefits accrue to firms that help develop a nascent market’s institutional infrastructure. To address this gap in the literature, we argue that involvement in building the regulative institutions in a new market—one form of participation on institutional building—helps a firm to build a reputation for as a leader in the market with a firm’s stakeholders. We argue that firms with reputations that are more established and more positive are benefit more greatly from the reputation-building effects of institution building. We test our claims in the context of the nascent carbon offsets market associated with the Kyoto Protocol, which has seen the development of 10,858 carbon offset projects in developing countries between 2003 and 2012. We find that involvement in institution building leads to private benefits to firms and that the benefits from institution building are greater for firms from more highly developed countries and older firms

Venture Acceleration and Entrepreneurial Growth in Central America

Intermediaries such as accelerators support entrepreneurial activity in developing countries by connecting entrepreneurs to critical resources and by reshaping the entrepreneurial ventures so they can better participate in larger markets. Existing research has examined the activities intermediaries undertake and how these activities influence intermediary effectiveness. However, we know much less about which entrepreneurial ventures benefit from intermediation. Using 24 months of pre- and post-intervention sales data for 139 ventures working with a business accelerator in Central America, we find that facilitating resource acquisition is less important than the constraints to change within the entrepreneurial ventures themselves. Thus, our study suggests that although facilitating resource acquisition through venture acceleration is important, it may be insufficient for increasing venture growth. Rather, the malleability of the venture may play a more important role in intermediation effectiveness

Globalization of social entrepreneurship opportunities

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as an important research topic in the literature. This interest stems from social entrepreneurs' role in addressing serious social problems on a worldwide scale while enhancing social wealth, often without regard for profits. In this article, we explain the forces contributing to the formation and rapid internationalization of social ventures. We use the behavioural theory of the firm to distil key attributes of social opportunities and show how these attributes influence the timing and geographic scope of social ventures' international operations

An equity crowdfunding research agenda: evidence from stakeholder participation in the rulemaking process

Equity crowdfunding is a unique form of entrepreneurial finance that combines elements of private and public equity. We articulate its distinctive features, then review and qualitatively analyze a large corpus of 540 public comments submitted by stakeholders in response to new US equity crowdfunding regulations. Through a qualitative content analytic approach, we combine actor (issuer, investor, and intermediary) and perspective (relational, behavioral, and technical) dimensions to develop a taxonomy of 18 categories, from which we derive and present unanswered questions and fruitful research directions in this emerging domain