Entrepreneurs can be a significant driving force behind efforts to lower GHG emissions through their capacity to develop and propagate innovative green solutions. However, green entrepreneurs face a number of obstacles including long development timelines for clean technologies, regulatory uncertainly and difficulties connecting with industrial and research partners. There is a strong policy rationale for providing specialised supports, including dedicated financial instruments and incubation and accelerator programmes.
Green Entrepreneurship
Green entrepreneurship is key to developing and propagating innovative green solutions needed to combat climate change.
Key messages
Governments in OECD countries have introduced a wide range of policies and schemes to stimulate and support green entrepreneurship in recent years. This suite of measures includes mechanisms that create and expand green markets (e.g. public procurement) and change firm behaviour (e.g. energy efficiency standards), along with high-level political commitments that signal the need to change the way that societies operate to mitigate the risks of climate change.
Many diverse actors – national and local government, private sector and non-government organisations – support green entrepreneurship. However, each typically operates independently with a distinct set of priorities and objectives, limiting the degree of co-ordination and coherence across green entrepreneurship policies and programmes. Governments can play a co-ordinating role by developing a unified strategy to help ensure that relevant entities are working towards common objectives and provide guidance to the many actors for whom green entrepreneurship support is only one of many activities. A core element of this co-ordinating role also covers the need to develop a green entrepreneurship data strategy to monitor progress and inform future policy development.
About
The OECD can support national, regional and local governments in strengthening the design and implementation of policy support for green entrepreneurs. We offer policy analysis and advice on policies and programmes that stimulate and support green entrepreneurship.
The OECD is also developing indicators to help countries benchmark themselves with other countries and to monitor their progress in achieving policy objectives.
Context
The environmental economy is growing faster than the overall economy
In the European Union, the environmental economy is growing faster than the overall economy. The contribution of the environmental economy to EU GDP increased from 1.6 % in 2000 to 2.3 % in 2018. During the same period, employment in the EU environmental economy increased from 3.1 million full-time equivalents to 4.4 million full-time equivalents. Green entrepreneurship is a key contributor to such job creation results.
Latest publications
Get in touch
For further information, please contact Jonathan Potter or David Halabisky
Jonathan Potter, Head of Unit
David Halabisky, Project co-ordinator