When values are not enough: the role of external enablement in early stage, sustainability-oriented industry creation

The creation of sustainable industries is widely regarded as one of the most pressing issues in policymaking and research alike. The growing scholarly work in this field so far mostly highlights agent-focused perspectives, such as how value-driven agents individually and collectively create significant and lasting change. We complement such studies by addressing the underlying business-environmental conditions that make participation in such industry creation attractive and potentially successful. Accordingly, we apply the external enablement (EE) framework to address how sociocultural, technological, and regulatory changes to the business environment, as external enablers, can contribute to the creation of a sustainability-oriented industry, the empirical example being the ongoing, potential creation of a viable automotive plastic recycling industry in Australia. We find that while all three types of enablers have important roles, their direct influence on shaping entrepreneurial action in this domain varies. While the value-based sociocultural pressure toward sustainability may have a fundamental role in driving global technology development and regulations toward sustainability, the microlevel agents concerned are variously driven by such concerns and stress much more the need for regulatory measures to make sustainability investments commercially attractive. By applying the EE framework to an ongoing case of industry (rather than just venture) creation, we develop insights about the varying controllability and proximal–distal qualities of external enablers. Further, we find that it is imperative that external enablement is sufficient across all significant types of agents in the emerging industry. To capture the latter, we add the concept of EE coverage. These are valuable new insights for future EE scholarship. By studying an ongoing case of industry creation where the actions of a values-driven coalition of microlevel agents do not seem to suffice as a primary driver of the industry creation process, we contribute important insights to literatures on sustainability entrepreneurship and industry creation about business-environmental influences as complement to the well-established, agent-focused notion of collective action as crucial in processes of industry creation.