The Sustainability Lens: A Powerful Tool for Unpacking Social Entrepreneurship Research

I just completed a fantastic week-long course, Virtual Summer School in Entrepreneurship Research 2025, offered through the Academy of Management and Dr. Vishal K. Gupta of The University of Alabama. As the founder and CEO of the Sustainability Lens (SL) and professor of Entrepreneurship at Suffolk University Sawyer Business School, I want to share some insights. The course got me thinking about how the Sustainability Lens Game, besides being a classroom learning tool, community development tool, and enterprise building tool, is also a powerful research tool, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is a dynamic field focused on using business logic to address social issues. Understanding what drives individuals to pursue a social mission and how social ventures operate sustainably requires diverse research approaches. One tool that offers significant potential for exploring these questions through both qualitative and quantitative lenses is the Sustainability Lens (SL).

The SL is a framework that combines insights from Suma Qamana (Indigenous ways of being) and Circles of Sustainability (place-based assessment). It proposes four key quadrants for understanding and building sustainability in enterprises: Resources, Health, Policy, and Exchange. The SL can be applied to various aspects of a business, such as the nine sections of the Business Model Canvas (BMC), generating numerous angles for imagining sustainable development. Its core purpose is to help organizations actively pursue, embrace, and share sustainability. More information about the 25 years of practitioner experience as a Fair Trade business owner and three years of Fulbright research that went into creating the SL framework can be found in my book, Social Entrepreneurship as Sustainable Development, and numerous peer-reviewed papers published under my name, Tamara Stenn.

Here's how the SL creates primary research data...

Dr. Tamara Stenn (left) conducting a mixed-methods Fulbright research study of quinoa producers in Bolivia. Challapata,2018. (photo: Munasqa Choque)

The Sustainability Lens and Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is valuable for exploring complex phenomena in depth, understanding experiences, and uncovering underlying mechanisms. The nature of the SL makes it particularly well-suited for qualitative inquiry for several reasons:

• Design-Thinking and Group Interaction: The SL is described as a design-thinking tool used in group discussions, workshops, and retreats to challenge current practices and assumptions. This aligns perfectly with qualitative methods like focus groups, interviews, and participatory observation, which are designed to capture rich, interactive data and explore how individuals and groups think and make decisions.

• Context and Perceptions: The Circles of Sustainability component, integrated into the SL, emphasizes understanding the social and cultural context and measuring people's perceptions and experiences of their environments and well-being. Qualitative studies can delve into how community members perceive and experience sustainability initiatives guided by the SL, providing a more accurate reading of their overall satisfaction and uncovering needs.

• Uncovering Needs and Opportunities: The SL is noted for its ability to uncover needs and identify opportunities for positive change. Qualitative methods can explore how social entrepreneurs use the SL to identify specific social or environmental problems, what kinds of opportunities are perceived, and how these insights inform their actions.

• Exploring Processes and Mechanisms: The SL helps imagine how things could be approached differently in areas like materials usage, transformation, distribution, or deliverables. Qualitative research can trace the process by which businesses integrate the SL into their operations, explore the mechanisms through which it influences strategic choices, and understand how it helps manage challenges like hybridity (balancing social and commercial goals).

• Culture Shift and Identity: Using the SL can lead to a culture of innovation and change within a business, potentially shifting it closer to a social enterprise culture. Qualitative methods can explore how such cultural shifts occur, how individuals' identities as social entrepreneurs evolve, and how this influences their intentions and actions.

Through qualitative studies, researchers can gain deep insights into how the SL is used in practice, the subjective experiences of those using it, and the contextual factors that influence its application and outcomes, particularly regarding engagement with stakeholders and the community, and the qualitative aspects of impact and scope (e.g., what kind of impact is sought, which areas of the business are prioritized).

The Sustainability Lens and Quantitative Research

Quantitative research allows for measuring relationships between variables, testing hypotheses, and assessing the magnitude of effects, often using statistical analysis. The SL also offers avenues for quantitative investigation:

• Measurable Constructs: The Circles of Sustainability component explicitly uses a scale-based survey instrument to measure perceptions and experiences. This provides a direct quantitative link. While the SL's application to the BMC yields conceptual "ways of thinking", these can potentially be operationalized into measurable constructs. Researchers could develop scales to assess the extent to which a business integrates the SL principles (Resources, Health, Policy, Exchange) across different business functions (BMC sections), or measure the frequency of SL tool usage.

• Measuring Impact: Social impact is a key outcome in SE. Quantitative studies could measure the impact of adopting the SL on various metrics, such as improvements in environmental performance (Resources quadrant), health outcomes for beneficiaries (Health quadrant), changes in policy influence (Policy quadrant), or quantifiable changes in distribution or access (Exchange quadrant). Researchers could compare quantitative social impact measures for enterprises using the SL versus those that don't.

• Assessing Scope and Engagement Levels: The scope of SL application could be measured quantitatively (e.g., number of BMC sections where SL principles are intentionally applied). The engagement facet could be assessed through quantitative measures of stakeholder participation levels, frequency of community interactions, or perceived value by beneficiaries.

• Linking to Intentions and Motivations: The SL is a tool used by individuals in businesses. SE research often studies individual intentions and motivations, linked to factors like self-efficacy and social worth. Quantitative studies could explore if using the SL influences social entrepreneurial self-efficacy (confidence in performing SE tasks), social worth (feeling valued by others), or ultimately, social entrepreneurial intentions.

• Testing Relationships and Mediating Effects: Quantitative studies using methods like Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), similar to research on entrepreneurial intentions, could test relationships. For example, does applying the SL (measured quantitatively) mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial characteristics (like empathy or prosocial motivation) and social impact, or between contextual factors and strategic choices?

By employing quantitative methods, researchers can measure the scale of impact and engagement, assess the scope of the SL's influence, and test hypothesized relationships between using the SL and measurable outcomes, contributing to predictive models in SE research.

The Future of Bolivia's Royal Quinoa Producers exposition was the culmination of Dr. Stenn's three years of Fulbright field studies and research.

Conclusion

The Sustainability Lens, with its comprehensive quadrants and practical application framework, offers a fertile ground for diverse research in social entrepreneurship. Whether through in-depth qualitative exploration of how it is used and its impact on culture and individual experience, or through quantitative measurement of its effects on social impact, engagement levels, and strategic outcomes, the SL can illuminate new pathways for understanding sustainable development in the entrepreneurial context. Studying the SL provides opportunities to advance our understanding of SE by integrating practical tools with robust academic inquiry across different methodologies.

I am happy to set up exploratory game plays online and consult or partner with colleagues, students, and peers on research projects and papers using the SL.

https://www.sustainabilitylensgame.com/If interested, please contact me at tamara.stenn@suffolk.edu.