Ecopreneurship

Ecopreneurship is a term coined to represent the process of principles of entrepreneurship being applied to create businesses that solve environmental problems or operate sustainably. The term began to be widely used in the 1990s, and it is otherwise referred to as "environmental entrepreneurship." In the book Merging Economic and Environmental Concerns Through Ecopreneurship, written by Gwyn Schuyler in 1998, ecopreneurs are defined as follows:

"Ecopreneurs are entrepreneurs whose business efforts are not only driven by profit, but also by a concern for the environment. Ecopreneurship, also known as environmental entrepreneurship and eco-capitalism, is becoming more widespread as a new market-based approach to identifying opportunities for improving environmental quality and capitalizing upon them in the private sector for profit. "

Although ecopreneurship initiatives can span a wide range of issues from ocean pollution to recycling to food waste, they tend to follow reoccurring environmental principles such as systems thinking, cradle to cradle product design, triple bottom line accounting, etc.

Systems Thinking is a core principle to any business concerned with sustainability and the environment. It is an approach to problem solving that studies how something interacts with its environment as a whole, whether that be social, economic or natural. This is in contrast to a linear thinking model, which would isolate a problem and study only its directly related processes to find solutions. It consists of the notion that in order to understand vertical problems (looking deeply at one particular issue), you must understand and evaluate the horizontal environment as a whole (the entire system and its interrelated functions). As it pertains to business is best illustrated in the book Entrepreneurship and Sustainability by Andrea Larsen,

"Systems thinking applied to new ventures reminds us that companies operate in complex sets of interlocking living and non-living, including markets and supply chains as well as non-living systems.... Taking a systems perspective reminds us that we are accustomed to thinking of business in terms of discrete units with clear boundaries between them. We forget that these boundaries exist primarily in our minds or as legal constructs."

A lot of companies using ecopreneurship principles incorporate sustainable product design. Product design incorporating sustainability can happen at any stage of the business, including material extraction, logistics, the manufacturing process, disposal, etc. Sustainable product design can be achieved using innovative technology (or Eco-innovation), cradle to cradle design, bio-mimicry, etc. In a description by the government of Canada's department on Innovation, Science and Economic Development, sustainable product design is further explained:

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