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Prof. Dr. Melissa Vasi FRSA
Professor & Program Director


Department: IT & Technology

DHAW - Deutsche Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften



Strategic Management for Sustainable Entrepreneurship


Entrepreneurship plays a key role in addressing complex societal and environmental challenges, requiring organizations and institutions to align innovation, strategy, and long-term value creation. Achieving this alignment involves not only entrepreneurial initiative but also strategic approaches that enable and sustain transformative action across different levels.

This line of research explores how strategic management enables entrepreneurship by shaping the conditions under which entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activities emerge and evolve across organizational and institutional contexts. So far, we have demonstrated how organizations design environments that foster entrepreneurial initiative, while also considering how broader systems and policy frameworks influence the direction and impact of such activities. In particular, the project focuses on how capabilities are developed and combined to support transformation and long-term value creation. It further investigates how sustainability-oriented strategies are embedded across different levels, connecting firm-level action with wider societal and environmental objectives.

Building on these findings, we are currently deepening our understanding of how strategic and entrepreneurial capabilities interact across organizational and institutional levels to drive sustainable outcomes. Ongoing research focuses on how different configurations of capabilities can support innovation, how organizations design environments that foster entrepreneurial behavior, and how institutional frameworks can enable or constrain sustainable entrepreneurship.

This project contributes to advancing theoretical and practical understanding of sustainable entrepreneurship by linking strategic management and institutional dynamics. It provides insights for entrepreneurs and policymakers on how to design strategies and environments that enable entrepreneurial action and support long-term sustainable transformation.

Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a global initiative led by the United Nations aimed at eliminating poverty, safeguarding the environment, and promoting peace and prosperity for everyone by 2030. These interlinked objectives offer a common framework to tackle the most pressing social, economic, and environmental issues facing the world. 
This project contributes to the following SDGs:  
SDG8
SDG8
SDG9
SDG9

Publications




Initiating Bottom-Up Action from the Top — Equifinal Pathways to Building Intrapreneurial Capability


Benedikt Unger, Francesca Sanguineti, Giuliano Sansone, Melissa Vasi




The European Union Sustainable Leadership Agency: Bridging the Gap Between Environment, Industry and Society—Home and Abroad


Razvan Hoinaru, Melissa Vasi, Maria Gabriela Horga

Robert Brinkmann, Chit Wityi Oo, The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Sustainability, chapter 30, Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, 2025, pp. 571-584



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