The social and environmental impact of entrepreneurship – a bibliometric and systematic review

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the broader field of entrepreneurship has developed so far when it comes to researching the impact of entrepreneurship on society and environment. The global transition to a more sustainable economy in recent decades has triggered the development of new subfields in the entrepreneurship literature, such as sustainable entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and environmental entrepreneurship. There has been considerable progress in these new research streams that consider the creation and evolution of new ventures in relation to their attempt to address bigger societal and/or environmental challenges. However, there is a need to reconsider the societal and environmental impact as not peripheral, but as central to the broader entrepreneurship as well. Therefore, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 148 articles to understand the evolution of the academic field, adopting a comparative approach and examining different bibliometric indicators. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by identifying the most influential journals, articles and authors, clustering the existing studies around four research areas (“social entrepreneurship and innovation”, “sustainable development and grand challenges”, “regional development and well-being”, and “female entrepreneurship”) and defining future research opportunities.