Indigenous Insights on Regenerative Entrepreneurship: Boundaries, Mindful Microfoundations, and Cultural Technologies of Support

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ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurship scholarship has long equated entrepreneurial activity with firm growth and macroeconomic development, yet mounting sustainability challenges demand alternative orientations. This paper reconceptualizes entrepreneurship around regeneration. Drawing on qualitative research with Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors in Victoria, Australia, it advances three arguments. First, entrepreneurship’s telos is re-specified as regenerative value creation within ecological and social boundaries. Second, the paper theorizes mindful entrepreneuring as a cultural– spiritual microfoundation, showing how care, reciprocity, and belonging orient entrepreneurial judgment and action. Third, it reframes support infrastructures as cultural technologies that script legitimate ventures and trajectories, and proposes design principles for selection, pacing, pedagogy, finance, and metrics aligned with regenerative aims. Together, these insights reorient entrepreneurship around regenerative aims, broaden microfoundations research, and illustrate how support infrastructures can be deliberately designed. They open pathways for policy and practice that foster entrepreneurship attuned to planetary boundaries and intergenerational futures.

BIOGRAPHY

Simona Grande (she/her) is a Doctoral Candidate in Organization Studies at the University of Agder (Norway) and the University of Turin (Italy). Her dissertation examines entrepreneurial ecosystems through paradox theory, focusing on sustainability-oriented contexts and underexplored mechanisms such as Indigenous ethics. During my PhD, I have been a visiting scholar at Arizona State University (USA), Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile), RMIT (Australia), and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico). She has conducted research in over 30 countries across six continents, collaborating with organizations including the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), Ashoka, and the World Economic Forum (WEF). She designs and delivers entrepreneurship programs from K–12 to executive education, with emphasis on challenge-based initiatives such as hackathons. She also serves on the communications team of the Academy of Management’s ONE Division and is a member of the European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform.