Grand Challenges & Sustainable Venturing

Increasingly, established businesses and aspirational entrepreneurs aim to come up with innovative solutions to grand challenges, i.e. important national or global problems. These challenges require special attention and skill as their solution requires to harness ambitious business thinking, combined with social responsibility and revolutionary science, technology, and innovation (U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, 2014). 

From an academic viewpoint, addressing grand challenges requires the "pursuit of bold ideas and the adoption of less conventional approaches to tackle large, unresolved societal problems" (Colquitt & George, 2011: 432), which requires new thought and action patterns in entrepreneurial creation and implementation.

Through collaborations with practice partners, we have begun to look into entrepreneurial initiatives that, in particular, aim at solving food challenges that rise from a growing global population: keeping up with the rising requirements on food production, closing the protein gap, and reducing food waste.