I noticed an interesting similarity between entrepreneurship and sustainability. Aside from the causal relationship (entrepreneurial innovation leads to more sustainable practices) there is also an analogy to be drawn between the short-term self-interests of private institutions who do not currently proactively fund either sustainable development or startups, and the public goods created by entrepreneurship and sustainable development. In other words, the Principals who possess the capital (corporations, funds, wealthy individuals) do not adequately invest in either risky startups or sustainable development, since most of the positive externatity of those investments cannot be quickly monetized. Invention raises the standards of living, and Sustainable development preserves ecosystems. Yet a private agent, by current market forces, often does not have the private incentives either to invest in their own sustainable practices for long-term efficiency, or in the equity investment of high-risk startups due to a lack of strategic focus.

The bottleneck is most often that entrepreneurship and sustainable development never get off the ground and remain in ‘idea land’ since any collaborating agent must set aside his own short-term self-interest in order to cooperate with other self-interested agents on a goal that might profit the public as much as it profits the institution. Sometimes the goals run in parallel, such as corporate investment in electric cars or alternative energy patents, where sustainable outcomes are also privately profitable to the investor. Yet often the goals are divergent, when an entrepreneur cannot bring his invention to public market because it might be more convenient to the investor or partner to create artificial scarcity, or a startup may not get funding from any one institution because each institution may want to develop the technology internally (or not at all).

Private institutions often create artificial scarcity of information, where a startup may have a technology whose distribution is both a private good to the investor or partner, and a public good to the economy. Yet what that invention is, how it can be used, and who might best take advantage of it is effectively privatized and kept secret via the corporate partners. The question of ‘who has the incentive to help fund, distribute, and integrate this innovation’ is similar to ‘who has an incentive to integrate this sustainable campaign’ in that few individual agents have the incentive to best capitalize on innovation within the context of public good. Often these innovations and sustainable campaigns are funded by universities, private benefactors, the government, or corporations looking to make a PR play. Yet both entrepreneurship and sustainability are not ’systemetized’ to incentivize all parties to act both out of private incentives and public good. Therefore it is a campaign for the next century to systemetize, through PR and marketing as much through legislation and tax credits, the macro-processes of discovery and distribution of innovation whose greatest benfactors may not be the investors but the public at large.