To which degree do Software Startups focus on Sustainability in their planning work?

Abstract

The United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), introduced in 2015, explicitly mention entrepreneurship as the vanguard of achieving a more sustainable society. Since software startups, with their high degree of innovation and impact, are archetypical entrepreneurial ventures, we wish to empirically investigate to which degree software startups focus on sustainability in their planning work.We will conduct this study using dynamic business plans entered by software startups in the entrepreneurial management system (EMS), Entreprenerdy, which is a planning and business development tool used by more than 30,000 entrepreneurial ventures from more than 120 countries to develop their business plans. By analyzing data from the Entreprenerdy EMS, we will investigate in which phases of the entrepreneurial process software startups have their sustainability foci. Due to the anonymous nature of the data and its large volume, the methods most suitable for this investigation are text data mining and Latent Dirichlet Allocation. This is a proposal for future research that we may conduct with these qualitative, exploratory methods.