Key Success Factors in Environmental Entrepreneurship: The Case of Wilderness Safaris

This chapter analyzes the entrepreneurial conception and evolution of the Wilderness Safaris (WS) ecotourism enterprise operating in eight African countries. It illuminates a series of factors that contribute to positive environmental impact as well as financial profitability and sustainability. WS has grown to be one of the largest and most successful ecotourism enterprises internationally.

Book abstract: This volume is the culmination of many discussions among the editors over the years, especially at the Sustainability, Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference, related to the growth and institutionalization of environmental and social entrepreneurship. Research on these two forms of entrepreneurial action has tried to keep pace with what is occurring in the field. While the research is diverse, attracting scholars across many disciplines and from all parts of the world, it is still in the formative stages. This volume seeks to take stock of the literature and report the state of the art in environmental and social entrepreneurship. In particular, it seeks to explore new theoretical directions that blend traditional notions of economic efficiency and social welfare and new ways of measuring and empirically testing these phenomena. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the diverse philosophical, methodological, and theoretical techniques to studying these forms of entrepreneurship. We expect this volume will contribute to this burgeoning research and that researchers will engage in theory development for the foreseeable future, as new business models are developed, tested, abandoned, and evolved.