Page - 297 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

2 Digital Entrepreneurship as aGameChanger for SustainableDevelopmentGoals (SDGs) Every new tech-generation makes our societies more inclusive, healthy, and democratic and leads to our institutions having greater transparency and account- ability (Pinker 2018). Through digital transformation, which can generally be understoodas the “disruptive implications of digital technologies” (Nambisan et al. 2019, p. 1), many new business and science areas have spawned—and numerous implications for culture and societywill most likely be enormous (Hausberg et al. 2019). Murphy et al. argue that it is entrepreneurshipwhich has been the main driver for the increase in (western) per capita income over the past 200–300 years (Murphy et al. 2006). Entrepreneurship can transform whole industries and scale solutions in aquicker andmore agileway thanother economicapproaches. It is not only one of the “transversal key competences applicable by individuals and groups”, (Bacigalupo et al. 2016, p. 10) as defined by the EuropeanCommission, but also a key driver for economic growth “at the heart of national advantage”, as Porter (1990, p. 125) noted.Digital transformationhas had an enormous impact on most aspects of daily life and has also changed the way organizations and whole industries operate (OECD 2019), facilitating new types of work and self-employment—and paving the way for digital entrepreneurship: “the enter- prising human action in pursuit of the generation of value, through the creation or expansion of economic activity, by identifying and exploiting new ICT [Informa- tion and Communications Technology] or ICT-enabled products, processes and correspondingmarkets” (Bogdanowicz 2015, p. 4). The pervasive accessibility of Internet services has lowered the barriers to start a project, organize, and interact online; this fosters ever-new forms of digital entrepreneurship, especially by allowing even those who could not or would not have formed a company tradi- tionally to find an audience and a market (Allen 2018). At the same time, the current stateofaccessibility and inclusiveness shouldnotbeoverstated: it is still the privilegedelite that utilizes andbenefits fromdigital entrepreneurshipopportunities the most (OECD/European Union 2019). When the United Nations Millennium DevelopmentGoals (MDGs)were formulated in the year 2000, digital technology had already become amajor part of everyday life, but few foresaw the degree to which it would permeate our lives only fifteen years later. In consequence, where the MDGs were mostly formulated in a technology-agnostic manner, the SDGs embrace the central role digital interconnectedness and technology generally have to play in improving the state of theworld (Noville-Ortiz et al. 2018). New ventures can and, more importantly, have a strong incentive, to catalyze structural changes in sectors currently held by large incumbents, whose incentives usually lie with maintaining the status quo (Apostolopoulos and Liargovas 2018; Hockerts andWüstenhagen 2010).While it is by nomeans a given that entrepre- neurswill be intrinsicallymotivated towards founding ventureswhich particularly take into account the SDGs, recent data from countries such as Germany is encouraging. It showsa trend towardsmorenewventures directed at solving social 306 M. Shamsrizi et al.