Abstract & Overview
Sustainability entrepreneurship is the use of innovative enterprise in a strategic manner to address a sustainability-related issue. By its operation, the process of sustainability entrepreneurship adds to the improvement of social, economic, and environmental concerns related to human quality of life. This work proposes that the distinction of sustainability entrepreneurship is having the business activity a characteristic of the innovation and making engineering or technology a critical component of the business solution. This work discusses how sustainability entrepreneurship can be introduced in undergraduate and graduate engineering curriculum, specifically through a materials science laboratory, engineering entrepreneurship, and engineering management experiences. Examples in this work demonstrate that sustainability entrepreneurship is a progression that begins with an understanding of the technical issues of sustainability as an engineering student, moves to the motivation, drive and identification of an opportunity that creates of a product or service valuable to an identified market, and finally creates a business that adds to the sustainability of life-supporting systems in the process.