Abstract
Global developments now place emphasis on sustainability as an obvious goal and sustainable entrepreneurship has become a novel area of entrepreneurship providing the link between sustainability management, entrepreneurial activities and sustainable development. SMEs form major business establishments across different economies and in view of their numbers, they can play significant role in driving sustainable development and could also be effective in receptiveness to environmental and social problems. The participation of entrepreneurial firms in active sustainability disposition tend to tilt more towards large organisations and industries than Small and medium enterprises (SMEs).The focus of the study therefore is to t establish factors that determine the extent to which SMEs can conduct business in a sustainable manner. The research utilized a descriptive method relying solely on review of secondary data and information in exploring theories underpinning entrepreneurship orientation and drivers of sustainable entrepreneurship behaviour among SMEs. Findings revealed that attitudinal, perceptual factors, firm size, sector, ownership, innovative orientation, personality, management skills, motivation, infrastructure, working capital management, and access to finance (amongst others) are critical to sustainable entrepreneurship among SMEs. The relativity of the observed critical factors to the ease of doing business in Nigeria by SMEs towards sustainable entrepreneurship was emphasised in the study. The study recommends the need for governmental agencies and educational establishments to provide adequate information and enlightenment to foster sustainable entrepreneurship among SMEs.
1. Introduction
Research on sustainable entrepreneurship has attracted wide interest in recent years following global developments that emphasis sustainability in addressing environmental and social issues. The concept of entrepreneurship has existed for ages and is considered as the essence of enterprise (Majid and Koe, 2012). It is centred on the identification, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). SME and entrepreneurship are often used interchangeably, but differ from each other in that entrepreneurship is a process that leads to the creation of SMEs and business endeavours, whereas SMEs are simply business ventures arising from entrepreneurial pursuits of individuals and is managed by individuals or owner-managers (Esuh, 2012). The extent to which entrepreneurs and managers are able to display their innate potentials, ingenuity, and dynamism goes a long way in determining wealth creation possibilities in an economy and the degree of competitiveness of its firms. Through entrepreneurial innovations, business opportunities are detected and resources are deployed towards translating the idea generated into viable business ventures in form of SMEs. According to Grahams (2010), the emergence of the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship has changed the ways people perceived business activities and their impacts on environment.
