Imagine a world where we measure the success of entrepreneurship not by how much it scales, but by how much life it supports.

Today, biodiversity loss is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. Entire ecosystems are collapsing, millions of species teeter on the brink of extinction, and the communities that depend on them especially in the Global South, face deepening vulnerability. These are not abstract threats; they are signals of a deeper crisis: the way we do business, the way we measure impact, and the way we teach the next generation of entrepreneurs. For over four centuries, colonialism extracted wealth from the Global South, tearing through forests, displacing communities, commodifying nature to fuel the rise of industrial economies in the North. The legacy of that extraction persists today. It lives on in the business models we celebrate. In the curricula we teach. In the metrics we trust.

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Despite increased global attention, conservation efforts still falter. Why? Because traditional economic and impact measurement tools fail to capture biodiversity’s full value, its spiritual, relational, and regenerative essence. Instead, entrepreneurship education continues to reproduce extractive logic: teaching students to disrupt, scale, and monetize, but not to care, repair, or regenerate. So,

can we still call someone an innovator if their business contributes to extinction?, or what if entrepreneurship education made extinction a learning outcome? and what if we measured entrepreneurial success by how much life it regenerates?  

 

At the heart of my research work is the recognition of a double blind spot between entrepreneurship and biodiversity conservation:

1. In recent years, many emerging approaches, regenerative entrepreneurship, nature-based entrepreneurship, biodiversity entrepreneruship, conservation entrepreneurship and so forth, have claimed to support biodiversity. While promising in language and in the current academic discourse and ongoing researches worldwide, many remain untested, underdefined, and methodologically fragmented. Without clear evaluative tools, it is difficult to determine whether these entrepreneurial practices are genuinely delivering biodiversity-positive outcomes, or simply engaging in “nature-washing” or superficial sustainability. This creates an urgent research need: how can we assess the effectiveness of entrepreneurial practices in delivering measurable, meaningful outcomes for biodiversity?

2. Entrepreneurship education today largely reflects a legacy of anthropocentric, growth-centric, and extractive business paradigms. In most business schools, incubators, and accelerators, biodiversity is not taught as a foundational concern. It is not understood as a condition for long-term prosperity, nor is it treated as an ethical obligation, relational practice, or intergenerational responsibility. This omission constitutes a profound biodiversity blind spot, a structural failure to include non-human life, ecological systems, and socio-environmental justice within the frameworks that shape future entrepreneurs. When biodiversity is excluded from learning environments, it becomes invisible in practice. As a result, entrepreneurs, even those with ethical or sustainability-oriented intentions, often fail to enact biodiversity-positive values in their business models. The capacity to act regeneratively is not simply about personal beliefs; it is also shaped by what is taught, what is legitimised, and what is measurable.

3. Value enactment refers to the translation of deeply held values, such as ecological care, biodiversity protection, or social justice, into tangible entrepreneurial decisions, strategies, and behaviours. Without a supportive educational ecosystem or meaningful indicators, these values often remain aspirational or tokenistic. In the context of biodiversity, value enactment means embedding the protection, restoration, and celebration of biodiversity into every aspect of a business: from sourcing and supply chains to governance, product design, and stakeholder engagement. It also means recognising non-human actors as stakeholders, and honouring Indigenous and local ecological knowledge systems. However, these forms of enactment require motivational drivers , as well as enabling conditions (enablers such as but not limited, policies, financial mechanisms, institutional support, ecosystemic guidance, and measurement systems that affirm and support such actions).

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These three failures feed one another have made a huge gap between entrepreneurship and biodiversity conservation. On one hand, If we don’t teach future entrepreneurs to see biodiversity, they won’t build for it. On the other hand, If we don’t measure what matters, they won’t regenerate it, they could protect it but not regenerate it. This is why we cannot solely focus on fix one side of the coin or the problem without solving the other.

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For instance, to support the enactment of biodiversity values, entrepreneurs need feedback systems that allow them to track their ecological impact, not just in carbon, but in life restored, habitats protected, species preserved, and relationships renewed.

However, traditional measurement frameworks are often:

• Reductionist (e.g., biodiversity reduced to a single score),

• Capitalist in logic (e.g., biodiversity credits commodifying nature),

• Detached from local and Indigenous knowledge systems, and

• Misaligned with ecological complexity, cultural meaning, and spiritual values.

So, when I am arguing and defending my view for measurement, means we should simultaneously argue for a radical reframing of what measurement means. Measurement not as extraction, but as care. Not as commodification, but as relational accountability. Not as market value, but as ecological, cultural, and ethical truth. 

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Hence, to regenerate biodiversity, we must reimagine entrepreneurship: how we assess it, how we support it, and how we taught it. And in that regeneration, we may just rediscover the true purpose of entrepreneurship, not to extract value from the Earth, but to return it. To validate and operationalise this framework, I require the time, guidance, and resources of a doctoral programme. My proposed PhD research will take this vision further through a mixed-methods approach focusing on the Global South. That is the reason I am particularly passionate about the nexus between entrepreneurship and biodiversity conservation. I believe this area has not received sufficient attention in current academic discourse. These insights have profoundly shaped my academic and professional journey, guiding my research focus and motivation to pursue a doctoral degree in the field I am completely passionate about.