Award-Winning Research: How Entrepreneurs Advance Sustainable Economic Systems

In this Q&A, Niki Khorasani describes her award-winning research, including her research questions, methods, and key findings.  She also shares what motives her to do this important work.

1. What is your research question?

My research explores how entrepreneurs can contribute to the enactment of degrowth as an alternative social imaginary. Degrowth means a shift away from economic expansion, toward principles such as sufficiency, equity, and well-being. My study examines entrepreneurs who are intentionally aligning their ventures with these values. This type of entrepreneurship is complex, because the assumptions, practices, and expectations that shape entrepreneurship are deeply embedded in growth-oriented thinking. My research explores how entrepreneurs navigate these constraints and translate their ideals into concrete, practice-based experimentation. My findings challenge the default assumption in entrepreneurship theory that growth is a necessary good, and highlight how alternative economic futures are not only imaginable but already emerging.

2. How did you study that question?

This project uses an inductive, qualitative research design that included 50 semi-structured interviews and approximately 80 hours of participant observation. Participants included entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs who had taken deliberate steps to align their ventures with the degrowth imaginary.

To ensure variation in institutional and policy contexts, purposive sampling was used across multiple countries and sectors. The study also incorporated direct observation of a post-growth incubator program and training events within a degrowth organization. This allowed for in-depth insight into how alternative imaginaries are introduced, internalized, and enacted in entrepreneurial settings.

To analyze this data, I used an iterative coding process grounded in existing theory. To contextualize my findings, I also analyzed approximately 5,000 pages of degrowth literature, which helped me map the moral, cosmological, and institutional dimensions of the degrowth imaginary.

3. What are one or two of your most interesting findings?

One of the central findings is that entrepreneurs working toward alternative futures must start with personal transformation. To sustain their commitment and action towards degrowth, entrepreneurs begin to slow down and recalibrate their internalized ideals about success, productivity, and self-worth. As they make these changes in their internal belief systems, they also start to cultivate a belief in their ability to act meaningfully toward a distant future grounded in degrowth.

A second key finding is that entrepreneurs treat their businesses like experimental spaces, where they prototype non-traditional business structures, like non-extractive business models, participatory governance, and post-growth financial arrangements. For example, one participant cofounded a coworking space, and wanted the working space to be created using open-source principles, like collective decision-making. He experimented with the use of GitHub (a cloud-based platform typically used to facilitate collaboration on software projects) to track the workspace’s operations. He reflected: “Imagine, instead of a software program, you are developing a space, and then you use GitHub and open-source tools to collaborate and develop together.”

Experiments like these don’t require entrepreneurs to detach from dominant institutions. Instead, they work within these institutions to gradually reconfigure the expectations and practices of entrepreneurship itself. 

4. Who outside of academia needs to know this? What should they do differently based on your findings?

Entrepreneurship educators, incubator leaders, and policymakers should be aware that not all entrepreneurs are oriented toward growth or scale. Many are actively working to redefine what business can mean—moving from extractive models toward ones rooted in care, sufficiency, and long-term ecological viability. That means that success metrics, support systems, and funding models should be expanded to include ventures whose values reflect degrowth, not just scalability.

In addition, sustainability and degrowth advocates should consider how to use entrepreneurship as a site of creative resistance and systemic experimentation. Rather than viewing business solely as an instrument of the dominant economy, it can also be a space where alternative economic futures are imagined, prototyped, and slowly normalized.

5. What motivated you to do a PhD in this area?

My academic trajectory began in environmental engineering, where I was trained to understand and respond to ecological crises through technical systems. However, I became increasingly interested in the social, institutional, and cultural roots of the crises themselves. I turned to the social sciences, hoping to gain clarity, but instead found a view of ecological problems that concerned me. There was a mainstream belief that ecological problems could be addressed by optimizing existing systems – which didn’t seem accurate to me. I believe the scale of ecological and social impacts of the current economic models is so big that it will require us to reorganize our economic system and make these issues central.

When I encountered the concept of degrowth, it provided language for what I had sensed was missing: a more fundamental questioning of progress, productivity, and economic purpose. It also opened space for thinking beyond problem-solving, toward the deeper task of reimagining.

My motivation has been to explore how individuals and organizations engage with this kind of questioning in practice—not perfectly, but with care and commitment. Pursuing a PhD allowed me to follow that curiosity and contribute to conversations that take alternative futures seriously, both conceptually and empirically.