Sustainable Entrepreneurship: Family Firms as Sustainability Pioneers Sylvie Scherrer and Claudia Binz Astrachan 1 Introduction Future-oriented companies have long recognized the call for sustainability to be an important strategic success factor rather than a short-term trend (Lacy et al. 2010; Nidumolu et al. 2009; Schaltegger et al. 2011). Younger customers in particular are increasingly demanding intelligent and sustainable product and service offerings, and employees prefer working for companies with a proven sustainability track record (Jenkin 2015). First signs of this re-evaluation of values have already become apparent—fair trade fashion has never been so chic, organic food has never so in demand, and sustainable employers have never been more popular than they are today (Zukunftsinstitut 2016). Current research also shows that a sustainability orientation can benefit a business economically, particularly when combined with entrepreneurial thinking and action, as well as a strong innovation orientation (Schaltegger and Wagner 2011). In contrast to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Corporate Sustainability—two approaches that are already established in research and practice—Sustainable Entre- preneurship is characterized by a strong market-based as well as innovation-oriented approach to sustainability. Young small and medium-sized companies such as the Swiss car-sharing company Mobility or bag manufacturer Freitag as well as established, large companies like Philips or Unilever demonstrated just how success- ful a sustainable entrepreneurship strategy can be. While these businesses differ in many aspects, they are all considered pioneers in their respective industry—a status they gained by continuously and consciously recognizing sustainability challenges as a source of inspiration for the development of new products, services and business S. Scherrer (*) · C. B. Astrachan Lucerne Business School, Luzern, Switzerland e-mail: sylvie.scherrer@hslu.ch; claudia.astrachan@hslu.ch © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 R. Altenburger (ed.), Innovation Management and Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93629-1_17 295