Martyna Anna Jurek will defend her PhD project "From systems thinking to entrepreneurial cognition: Uncovering how organizations bridge the complexity gap to address grand challenges".
Summary
Addressing grand challenges in sustainable development requires fundamental transformations in how businesses operate, yet progress remains inadequate. This dissertation investigates how organizations contribute to sustainable development by examining the critical role of complexity navigation through a multi-dimensional exploration of systems thinking, business models, and entrepreneurial cognition.
Employing a critical realist perspective and double-loop learning framework, the research comprises three interconnected studies that progressively unpack complexity of business contribution to sustainable development.
- The first study systematically reviews existing business approaches to the Sustainable Development Goals, revealing limited systems thinking implementation and offering practical guidelines for more effectively embedding systems thinking principles in organizational approaches. Recognizing that organizational strategies ultimately stem from individual decisions, the subsequent studies shift focus to the cognitive processes of organizational decision makers.
- The second study explores sustainable entrepreneurs' perceptions of barriers and uncertainties in business model design, uncovering a fundamental tension between profit and impact objectives.
- The third study identifies impact uncertainty as a distinct type specific to sustainable entrepreneurship and demonstrates how entrepreneurs' responses to uncertainty can transform perceived complexity into a driver for business model experimentation and systemic impact.
The research develops a process model of complexity navigation where organizations increase their system complexity to match environmental complexity. This multi-layered analysis offers theoretical insights and practical guidance for organizations seeking to develop requisite complexity for addressing grand challenges.
Supervisors
Associate Professor Francesco Rosati, DTU Entrepreneurship, Denmark
Senior Lecturer Dr. Krzysztof Dembek, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Examiners
Professor Carina Lomberg, DTU Entrepreneurship, Denmark
Professor Steffen Korsgaard, University of Southern Denmark
Professor Domenico Dentoni, Montpellier Business School, France
Chair person at defence
Associate Professor Argyro (Iro) Nikiforou, DTU Entrepreneurship, Denmark.
Live streaming of Martyna's defence
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A copy of the PhD thesis is available for reading at DTU Entrepreneurship,371, 2nd floor, Diplomvej, DK-2800 Kgs Lyngby.