Accomplishing environmental sustainability as an ethical responsibility; evidence from entrepreneur engineers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sustainability and entrepreneurship are two concepts widely discussed in the contemporary world. Nowadays, the concept of sustainability is merged with entrepreneurship and directs entrepreneurs into a sustainable entrepreneurial journey. Many engineers have started entrepreneurial ventures, majorly in technology disciplines in Sri Lankan and international context, which are not adequately studied in the literature. Hence, the authors have designed an exploratory study on entrepreneur engineers’ ethical practices in Sri Lanka, employing grounded theory approach. The present study investigates how entrepreneur engineers in Sri Lanka accomplish environmental sustainability as an ethical responsibility. Data were collected from purposively sampled fifteen entrepreneur engineers in Sri Lanka by conducting face to face semi-structured interviews. Voice recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed following grounded theory techniques with the support of NVivo software. The analysis has revealed that entrepreneurial engineers who participated in this study had a higher personal commitment to environmental sustainability while trying to accomplish sustainability by educating, introducing novel methods, planting trees, system optimisation, reusing, and recycling. Orientation towards sustainability has affected the entrepreneurial performances of a few of them too. Emerging entrepreneur engineers can utilise the findings of this study to contribute further to environmental sustainability through their business operations while achieving business success. Further studies can be conducted to expand the knowledge base of entrepreneur engineers’ sustainable entrepreneurship while identifying profitable ways of establishing sustainable practices based on the findings of this study using qualitative and quantitative techniques.