Green Entrepreneurship, by The Entrepreneurs Network in partnership with the Enterprise Trust examines how entrepreneurs, and their innovative technologies and ideas, can help deliver not only a more sustainable tomorrow, but also economic growth, exports, and jobs.
Headline findings
To help inform our research, we partnered with Opinium to poll over 500 small and medium-sized businesses in Britain about their attitudes towards various environmental questions.
One of the most revealing questions we asked regarded whether or not businesses believed that the shift to a more sustainable economy represented positive opportunities to them. Over three-fifths of respondents answered in the affirmative, with just eight per cent disagreeing.
Other questions we asked revealed how fully 56 per cent of businesses agreed that employees increasingly want to work in businesses which are environmentally responsible - rising to nearly two-thirds of businesses aged five years or younger.
We also found that nearly half (47 per cent) of businesses similarly believed that their customers expect them to be taking more steps to be environmentally responsible. Only 23 per cent disagreed.
The issues customers that are most keen for businesses to address ranged from using renewable energy sources, to increasing recycling rates, to making packaging more sustainable, to reducing unnecessary travel and energy use. Indeed, what we effectively found was that there was a genuine diversity of environmental problems out there, all of which one could plausibly say require environmental entrepreneurs to be devising solutions for.
Lastly, we tested businesses’ opinions towards how well the government was doing in terms of helping them to tackle environmental problems. The most common answer was one of general ambivalence - 38 per cent of businesses think the government is doing neither well nor badly. Slightly more think it is doing badly (30 per cent) than do well (24 per cent).
These data could be interpreted in lots of different ways, but one reading would be that despite all of the new policies and attention devoted to the environment by the government – especially in the last few years – businesses still think it has more to do.
Key Recommendations
The key thesis of the report is that the issues we focus on - climate change, air pollution, and resource misuse - are examples of market failures. Market failures arise when people do not bear the full social costs of their actions, or when they are not fully rewarded for the social benefits their services provide.
Governments can seek to mitigate environmental market failures by ‘internalising’ both negative and positive externalities - perhaps by taxing environmental harms, such as greenhouse gas emissions, or subsidising activities which alleviate environmental pressures, such as research and development into, for example, battery technologies to clean up transport.
We make 20 specific recommendations which the government could adopt to nudge the country in a more sustainable direction.
Case Studies
The report showcased a number of entrepreneurs who are committed to addressing climate change, air pollution, and resource misuse.
Jamie Crummie, Too Good to Go
Jamie Crummie is a co-founder of Too Good To Go, a marketplace app designed to connect businesses who have surplus food for sale to consumers. Food waste is a significant driver of climate change as uneaten food releases greenhouse gases when it breaks down. Too Good To Go also helps businesses, as Jamie explains: “It’s a win for our businesses who are able to recover sunk costs on food that would otherwise go to waste”.
Jo-Jo Hubbard, Electron
Jo-Jo Hubbard is the co-founder of Electron, which is helping to radically transform how electricity works right across the world. Electron’s platform - ElectronConnect - allows network operators, distributed energy resources, and others to cocreate local markets and trade and optimise the combined use of network capacity and renewable generators. This facilitates more intelligent energy management, which will be critical as renewables occupy more of the grid. As Jo-Jo remarks: “The conversation around net zero has a tendency to focus on simply building more renewable capacity. That’s certainly welcome, but without flexibility and the services which enable that, there’s a limit to the amount we can add”.
Katrina Borissova, Little Danube
Katrina Borissova launched Little Danube in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a mission to produce sustainable vegan cosmetics. Her soap bars are longer lasting than liquid soaps, and use less energy to produce. Less packaging is needed as well - and Little Danube make use of compostable mailers and toxic free inks to minimise their products’ environmental footprint further. Katrina foresees huge growth in the sustainable cosmetics industry, noting: “There’s probably a time five years from now where, if you’re not natural and clean, you’re not on the shelf”.
Jo Bamford, Ryse Hydrogen
Jo Bamford founded Ryse Hydrogen in 2018 to tackle the twin issues of climate change and air pollution. Many think that sustainable hydrogen, produced via electrolysis, can complement the battery revolution witnessed in the personal car market, and be put to use decarbonising heavier forms of transport. Jo explains why hydrogen could be particularly useful for certain heavy vehicles, such as buses and lorries: “Unlike batteries, which can take hours to fully recharge, vehicles which run on hydrogen can be refuelled just as quickly as you would a normal petrol or diesel model. You pump in the hydrogen, and off you go. This means drivers can be on the road for longer, making deliveries, populating more routes or picking up more passengers”.
Alex Fisher, Saturn Bioponics
Alex Fisher is the founder of Saturn Bioponics, which seeks to revolutionise how we grow our food. Instead of using conventional fields, Saturn Bioponics takes a vertical approach, sowing crops in stacks of hydroponic towers. This minimises the need to clear habitats for food production, among other benefits. As Alex notes: “We offer a solution which delivers sustainable intensification whilst simultaneously increasing productivity by up to four times and reducing production costs”.
Partner
The Enterprise Trust was launched in 2011 by Richard Harpin, the entrepreneur behind the UK’s leading home repairs and improvements business HomeServe, now a FTSE 250 company valued at more than £4bn. The charity aims to create an impact and leave a legacy by helping individuals from all backgrounds to realise their potential as independent wealth generators. In 2020 the charity launched a research arm to extend its reach and provide important insight, new thinking and evidence-based problem-solving around the key issues affecting the UK’s small business community.