Abstract

The transition to a circular economy requires entrepreneurs who can create value from waste, design regenerative business models, and navigate resource-constrained environments. Yet understanding what enables circular entrepreneurial success remains fragmented across the sustainability and entrepreneurship literatures. This dissertation examines how entrepreneurial support systems, capability configuration, and external enabling conditions shape circular venture development and performance through three complementary studies that together advance a unified framework of circular entrepreneurial effectiveness. Study 1 employs participatory action research with a donor-funded incubation program in Jordan, examining how stakeholder priorities reconfigure support systems for circular entrepreneurs. Analysis of two cohorts reveals that stakeholder-driven modifications to recruitment criteria (emphasizing bricolage and alertness), broadened opportunity scope, and project-based training with circular economy tools substantially improved venture outcomes. The findings demonstrate how conventional incubators can adapt to support circular innovation through iterative stakeholder engagement, and they identify the specific entrepreneurial behaviors that matter most for circular venture success. Study 2 builds directly on Study 1's behavioral insights by quantitatively examining how entrepreneurial and circular bricolage shape venture performance across circular and conventional business models. Using multi-group structural equation modeling, latent profile analysis, and response surface analysis on a bi-national sample of 439 ventures from the United States and Myanmar, this study identifies a competency trap (Levitt & March, 1988) operating in circular venture contexts, in which ventures that over-emphasize domain-specific (circular) bricolage without developing generalist (entrepreneurial) bricolage exhibit the poorest performance outcomes. Study 3 extends the investigation from internal capabilities to external enabling conditions using Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of 30 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs (15 circular economy, 15 conventional), calibrated using the Generic Membership Evaluation Template (GMET). The analysis reveals that circular and conventional ventures do not just face different numbers or levels of barriers but appear to operate under structurally different causal architectures. For CE ventures, technological readiness achieves full prerequisite status;  simultaneously necessary for success, present in every success pathway, and failure-defining in its absence; requiring de novo capability development to enable the physical transformations that define circularity. For conventional ventures, market acceptance functions as the core anchoring condition, satisfying necessity and universal sufficiency presence, but whether it achieves full prerequisite status cannot be determined because the failure analysis was uninformative. The structural difference is therefore not that the two venture types have different prerequisites, but that CE ventures demonstrably operate under one while conventional ventures may not. Together, these studies advance both sustainability and entrepreneurship scholarship by demonstrating that circular entrepreneurship requires different capability configurations (Study 2), different support systems (Study 1), and operates under a different causal architecture (Study 3). The overarching contribution is a framework of circular entrepreneurial effectiveness that integrates internal capability dynamics with external structural constraints, arguing that successful circular ventures must balance generalist entrepreneurial flexibility with domain-specific circular capabilities (the capability balance imperative), while simultaneously securing the technological foundations on which their entire causal architecture appears to rest (the Technology Imperative), and operate within entrepreneurial ecosystems which are iteratively adaptive to stakeholder requirements within the circular economy (The Adaptive Support Imperative). This dissertation provides actionable insights for entrepreneurs navigating sustainability transitions, incubators designing support programs, investors evaluating circular ventures, and policymakers fostering circular economy development.

Publication Date

5-5-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Sustainability (Ph.D.)

Department, Program, or Center

Sustainability, Department of

College

Golisano Institute for Sustainability

Advisor

Clyde Eirikur Hull

Advisor/Committee Member

Eric Williams

Advisor/Committee Member

Richard DeJordy

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

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