Dear Colleagues,

A stream of research in recent years has addressed sustainable entrepreneurship as a way to balance the economic, environmental, and social dimensions in new ventures creation (e.g., Muñoz and Cohen, 2017). However, as Fischer et al. (2020) suggest, sustainability should not be treated as a binary variable, and thus sustainability performance can arise from entrepreneurial activities and behaviors inside firms (intrapreneurship) whose primary goal is not sustainability. Although research has traditionally focused on intrapreneurship at the organizational level (i.e., corporate entrepreneurship; CE) (e.g., Kuratko, 2017), the literature on intrapreneurship (e.g., Neessen et al., 2019) highlights the bottom-up nature of the construct and the importance of the entrepreneurial behavior of employees (EBE) to shape organizational strategic direction.

In this vein, there is a research gap on how entrepreneurship inside firms can contribute to corporate sustainability, particularly to its social dimension, which is considered by some authors to be the weakest one within the triple bottom line (TBL), especially compared to the environmental dimension (Wu et al., 2015, Martins and Pato, 2019). Definitions of the social dimension (e.g., Wu et al., 2015; Antolin et al., 2016; Huo et al., 2019) highlight that organizations need to commit to the wellbeing of different stakeholders, from both internal and external sides of the organization—namely, employees (i.e., issues regarding training, development, equality, working conditions, or employee wellbeing), communities (i.e., philanthropic activities), business partners (i.e., transparent transactions), or consumers (i.e., customer care, customer education).

Given this research opportunity, the aim of this Special Issue is to advance our understanding of the relationships between intrapreneurship (corporate entrepreneurship and EBE) and the social dimension of sustainability by either exploring how a social sustainability orientation is able to enhance intrapreneurship or analyzing intrapreneurship as a driver of sustainability. On the one hand, for instance, stakeholder theory or an open innovation perspective provide new insights for understanding sustainability orientation as a driver of intrapreneurship. A sustainability-oriented firm struggles to understand and satisfy the demands of its stakeholders (Shou et al. 2019), which allows the organization to acknowledge its needs and expectations and gain external knowledge (Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014) that may be relevant when developing entrepreneurial behaviors (Neessen et al., 2019). On the other hand, most of the studies carried out on the consequences of intrapreneurship analyze variables related to the positive impact it has on the overall economic performance of the company (Bierwerth et al., 2015). However, the impact of intrapreneurship on social performance according to the TBL has received little attention. In addition, it is necessary to investigate the consequences of intrapreneurship at the individual level. In this vein, some scholars (e.g., Gawke et al., 2018) have suggested that the intrapreneurial behavior of employees may relate to employee wellbeing, through crafting more resourceful versus more demanding work environments.

For this Special Issue, we welcome original contributions dealing with systematic reviews, case studies, survey findings, analytical methods, and tools that explain the relationship between entrepreneurship inside firms (CE and EBE) and the social dimension of sustainability.

Prof. Dr. Ana B. Escrig-Tena
Prof. Dr. Mercedes Segarra-Ciprés
Guest Editors

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• Corporate entrepreneurship (CE)
• Entrepreneurial behavior of employees (EBE)
• Social dimension
• Work conditions
• Employee wellbeing
• Stakeholder engagement
• Open innovation
• Local communities
• Transparent transactions
• Customer care