Title: Impact entrepreneurship to fight global warming: from utopia to practice

Authors: Carine Sonntag; Gabriela Torres Ramos

Addresses: ICN Business School Nancy, 86 Rue du Sergeant Blandan, 54000 Nancy, France ' Inist, CNRS, 2, Allée du Parc de Brabois, Rue Jean Zay, 54500 Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France

Abstract: Team for the Planet®, or TFTP, is a 'citizen community dedicated to global action', whose mission is 'to fight against climate change at a large-scale' (http: //www.team-planet.com). Gathering a community of investors, entrepreneurs, inventors and citizens, they aim to fund new ventures to market impactful innovations devoted to capturing or reducing CO₂ emissions. TFTP addresses a systemic challenge through entrepreneurship in a way that neither the literature nor other organisations have done before; their proposal is complex and requires imaginative construction and understanding. In our research, we address the question of how people appropriate the TFTP proposal. We combine perspectives from economics, entrepreneurship and sociology to reflect on data collected through a netnography. We discuss the case as a real utopia and show that people agree to fund the movement without dividends, because they commit to the movement for a greater purpose than rent-seeking, believe in the viability and achievability of the proposal, and feel empowered by fighting global warming through the community.

Keywords: real utopia; impact entrepreneurship; sustainable entrepreneurship; sustainable innovation; communities; global warming; grand challenges; netnography; Team for the Planet; TFTP; carbon neutrality; no dividend; open source.

DOI: 10.1504/IJTM.2024.138818

International Journal of Technology Management, 2024 Vol.95 No.3/4, pp.456 - 481

Received: 31 May 2022
Accepted: 14 Jun 2023
Published online: 31 May 2024 *

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