Improving Entrepreneurial Ecosystems to Support Climate Innovation:
fsQCA Applied to Stakeholder Insights

Dinesh Moorjani
Advisor: Rishee Jain
Co-Advisor: Ashby Monk

Time: Friday, June 6th, 2025 from 12:00 – 1:00pm PT
Location: Y2E2 Room 299

Abstract
The global response to mitigate and adapt to climate change has failed to curb the devastating effects on our human, natural, and built system. Among the current response measures, entrepreneurship serves as a central tool for developing technological innovations to mitigate and adapt to the deleterious impacts. Our research identifies the necessary conditions and success pathways for climate technology entrepreneurs and climate venture capital firms to commercialize solutions, and for policymakers to spur corrective action. We applied fsQCA to deep case studies assembled from semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders across climate technology entrepreneurial ecosystems. We find the presence of management leadership is a necessary condition for climate deep tech startups to demonstrate success outcomes. Government support is not a necessary condition. We identify two distinct success pathways in our intermediate solution and draw attention to a third viable pathway for climate deep tech startups to succeed. In a complementary study, we investigate four conditions of interest among climate venture capital funds. We find the presence of high exit potential to be a necessary condition. We demonstrate three novel success pathways and distill the presence of high exit potential as a standalone, viable success pathway for venture capital funds investing in climate technology innovation. Our findings offer practical implications for entrepreneurs and investors deploying scarce resources, policymakers spurring climate innovation, and researchers advancing the fields of entrepreneurship, deep tech innovation, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.