Resumo

Ecopreneurship concerns for the minimization of environmental degradation and considering the use of natural resources in product manufacturing and in the services provided by enterprises. Identifying the possibilities resulted from the environment, as well as market failures (Dean & McMullen, 2007) may enable ecopreneur to strengthen and establish their businesses. In order to do so, the entrepreneurs go through stages of the entrepreneurial life cycle, in which they have to adapt, in order to develop and get properly settled in the market.

Considering the context and reality of entrepreneurs in Brazil, therefore, this study proposes to analyze the adaptation of ecopreneurs in each stage of the entrepreneurial life cycle. Thus, this paper aims at understanding how entrepreneurs need to adapt, in time, in each stage of the entrepreneurial life cycle

"Sustainable entrepreneurship involves the identification, exploration and exploitation of new businesses that are, in economic development, the solution of an environmental or social problem" (Boszczowski & Teixeira, 2012, p.143), and the phases of the entrepreneurial life cycle can be observed. Being the ecopreneurship a subset of sustainable entrepreneurship, we can infer that these phases can be applied to it, since the life cycle of these business involves the identification, exploration and exploitation of opportunities, that produce both economic and ecological benefits to society.

Based on a qualitative approach of a descriptive nature, a multiple case study was held comprising four entrepreneurs from environmental enterprises located in Brazil. The data collection was performed through documental analysis, from information available in institutional websites of the enterprises selected and from semi-structured interviews with one of the owners of each enterprise selected for this study. After this stage, the data were analyzed through the content analysis technique, as proposed by Bardin (2010).

It can be noted that during the opportunity identification stage, all entrepreneurs, despite their business contexts, had to improve their knowledge regarding the type of business they lead. During this stage all entrepreneurs are aiming at filling a market gap. At the second stage each entrepreneur has to improve their weak points. At the opportunity exploitation stage, all eentrepreneurs had to adapt their original business and strategic plans to the specific needs of their potential consumers. Thus, the first and third stages were common to all entrepreneurs analyzed, despite their contexts

The results demonstrated that the context analyzed may influence types of adaptation related to each stage. In the cases here analyzed, it was possible to note that during the identification and the exploitation phases, the adaptations of the entrepreneurs were very similar, since the former regards deepening the knowledge of the industry the entrepreneurs are aiming at, and the latter regards adjusting the business plans and strategic actions to potential consumers’ actual needs. In the exploration stage, however, each of them aimed at improving their specific weak points.

Boszczowski, A. K. & Teixeira, R. M. (2012). ‘O empreendedorismo sustentável e o processo empreendedor: em busca de oportunidades de novos negócios como solução para problemas sociais e ambientais’. Revista Economia e Gestão, 12, 141-168. Bardin, L. (2010). Análise de conteúdo. Lisboa: Edições 70. Dean, T. & McMullen, J. S. (2007). ‘Toward a theory of sustainable entrepreneurship: Reducing environmental degradation through entrepreneurial action’. Journal of Business Venturing, 22, 50–76.