Sustainability in technology driven business environments: A company-level approach

A Vital Entrepreneurial Learning Organisations (VELO) has to (1) collect and interpret meaningful information from the business environment, (2) take entrepreneurial decisions in established and new businesses and (3) design the organisational architecture to pursue business opportunities. A systems approach was developed for a VELO and is presented in this paper. The VELO has to perform these three basic entrepreneurial tasks in interaction with a dynamic and complex global business environment. This requires exploring the future, predicting technology developments and preparing for the unknown. Developing visions of the future and linking the foresight to entrepreneurial decision-making is a big challenge in today's global economy. Global sustainable development is a widely accepted vision in today's world. Despite of the practical problems, this vision gives future direction for emerging technologies and changes in social, economic and ecological dimensions. The view on the global challenge of a sustainable development shows enterprises' opportunities to achieve and sustain vitality at the company-level: The VELO can contribute to a global sustainable development via innovation in new and established businesses to maintain their own competitiveness, reputation and economic substance. The paper describes global and company-level perspectives on sustainability and business opportunities as well as the interaction between the VELO and the global business environment. The research method is exploratory using literature data and Vester's sensitivity analysis methodology to present a set of variables and an influence matrix to describe the networking between the VELO and its environment as a total system.