Growing for sustainability: Enablers for the growth of impact startups – A conceptual framework, taxonomy, and systematic literature review

Impact startups are innovative new ventures that diffuse solutions at scale that have a sustainability net benefit. They play an important role in the sustainability transition as actors for the introduction and diffusion of sustainability innovation. While the relevance of new entrants and young ventures has been acknowledged in sustainable entrepreneurship and transition research, it remains unclear how individual startups grow and successfully present their sustainability-oriented market innovations and transform markets towards sustainable development. Referring to this research gap, we concentrate on the subset of growth-oriented impact startups that substitute less sustainable practices through new technologies, products, or services and the factors that influence their growth and sustainability benefits. The paper makes three contributions. First, we provide a conceptual framework for explaining how impact startups contribute to sustainability transition through growth. Second, we show how factors of startup growth and sustainability net benefits can be organized in a taxonomy. Third, based on a systematic literature review we provide an overview of current knowledge about empirically verified factors and enablers of startup growth and sustainability net benefits. By this we can show that there has been limited empirical research on external enablers for the growth of startups and that there is hardly empirical research that explains the sustainability contribution of startups.