Unpacking the drivers of the socio-environmental sustainability of new ventures: insights from innovative digital start-ups in Italy

Thanks to the pervasive adoption of digital technologies across different industries, “digital-born companies” nowadays play a pivotal role in the current techno-economic scenario. The concurrent sustainability imperative has generated constraints and entrepreneurial opportunities for new ventures. A narrow part of the entrepreneurship literature has analyzed the relationship between the emerging digital phenomenon and the transformative capacity of ICT start-ups as a potential key driver to tackle grand societal challenges due to their ability to alter business models and/or optimize existing resources. Following this line of reasoning, we analyze how strategic orientation and boundary-spanning activities of ICT start-ups relate to their socio-environmental sustainability. Poisson family estimations (negative binomial and zero-inflated negative binomial) of 172 innovative ICT start-ups based in Italy reveal different driving factors of their socio-environmental sustainability. Our work provides novel insights into the sustainability drivers of digital start-ups, suggesting differentiated strategies for entrepreneurs aimed at fostering socio-environmental sustainability as one of their primary goals. Market strategic orientation is more associated with social sustainability, while technological strategic orientation is more associated with environmental sustainability. The development of a wide portfolio of partnerships seems beneficial only for social sustainability, with no effect on environmental sustainability.