Sustainable Entrepreneurship in Greece

In the context of “creative destruction”, businesses and companies are founded, developed and disappear, having set a successful or unsuccessful course, while others evolve, reorganize and continue their activities, despite their size, their field of action and the economic situation at local, regional or international level.

These include sustainable businesses and companies that apply five principles:

  • creativity (innovation, entrepreneurship),
  • scalability (designing solutions that can be applied to the mass market),
  • responsiveness (using the business to directly address global social and environmental challenges),
  • glocality (adopting global best practices while maintaining local adaptation and sensitivity); and
  • circularity (acceptance of zero waste, closed loop production).

A Sustainable Business is any business that integrates sustainability and responsibility into its strategy, operations and products to make a transformative, positive impact on the biggest social and environmental challenges we face.

Green entrepreneurship is one of the main pillars of European policy, while it is slowly becoming established in Greece, in the context of compliance with Community policies and the exploitation of the relevant funding opportunities that arise through national and European programs.

A great example of European programs is the RE-START project, which aims to support young people who attempt to develop their circular start-up. RE-START aids young people to understand better the concept of Circular Economy (CE) and how it can be further embraced as a sustainable way of thinking and operating for the EU start-ups of the 21st century.

Moving forward with the project’s implementation, the first draft of the RE-START Circular Business Plan Toolkit has already been developed, including a Self-Assessment Tool containing a set of closed-ended questions, where each answer will correspond to a specific level of business idea readiness and/or circularity, and a Business Model Canvas, with a strategic management template used for developing new business models.

The next steps of the project’s implementation involve the development of the PR2 E-training program, which involves primary and secondary research, meaning the basis for creating a training course.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them. 2021-1-CY01-KA220-HED-000032155

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