Page - 295 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

provide: the “memoreBox”of social start-upRetroBrainR&D, a special edition of gamelab.berlin’s app “Singleton”, and D-Wave’s free access to its cloud quantum computing services. All these examples of digital entrepreneurship utilize inwholeor inpart acombinationofopen innovation, futureandemerging technologies,andsocialbusiness, thussupportingourrationale.Thearticlecloses with recommendations for different stakeholders of entrepreneurial ecosystems, demonstratingboth thenecessity and thepotential ofdigital entrepreneurship for the SDGs and the “Decade ofAction”. 1 Introduction Wehaveachoice—eitherwegobackon theold tracks,orwebuildnewtracks to takeus to a new civilization.We are now in position to build new tracks.Wemissed our chance in 2008 inbuilding those after theglobalfinancial crash.Let usnotmiss the chance this time. MuhammadYunus1 The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) initiated and adopted by all UnitedNationsMemberStates in2015havebeen adriving force behindnumerous initiatives andprojects around theworld.Theyconstitute anagenda for sustainable development that “provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future” (United Nations Department of Public Information 2015, p. 1)while also serving as calls to action for a better future. At their core, SDGs are interdisciplinary, intersectional, and interdependent and address a variety of areas that are of critical importance for both humanity and the planet: environmental protection, ending hunger, and reducing inequality are clo- sely linked to, e.g. sustainable consumption andmanagement of natural resources, improving education and providing elementary health care and sanitation for all. Still, five years into the programme timeframe, many initiatives and projects still fail to address this fundamental interconnectedness. These risks fall short of not only their potential, but also interference and competition for already scarce resources. Inconsequence, theUNdeclared the2020s tobe the“DecadeofAction” (Guterres 2020, p. 1) and has since then appealed to states, corporations, non-governmental organizations, and other stakeholders to more consistently and deliberately combine forces in order to deliver on the goals set out in 2015 (United Nations 2020). The global COVID-19 pandemic that began to unfold in late 2019, severely shuttering the global economy starting fromFebruary 2020 and expected to cause theworst global recession in almost a century (BBC2020), serves as an additional stark warning of just how necessary an alignment of forces is. At the time of this writing (end of May, 2020), despite rapid and extensive public health measures being taken inmanycountries, there aremore than5.4million confirmedcases and 1Corona Pandemic: Time Is RunningOut Fast, ALetter fromProf.MuhammadYunus (2020). 304 M. Shamsrizi et al.