Designing under constraints: How entrepreneurs make the future in Belgium’s construction industry
(2025) Journal of Business Venturing Design — Vol. 4, p. 100033 (2025)
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- Based on a qualitative case study, this paper explores how Greenbuildings, a Belgian eco-construction venture, engages in future-making (FM) practices to render sustainable alternatives compulsory in an unsustainable industry. Compulsory futures, we find, are imagined futures shaped not by aspiration but by necessity, when ecological, health, or economic threats impose non-negotiable constraints on what must be excluded or transformed in the present. Drawing on Simon’s (1993, 1996) design theory and the FM literature, we identify practices that entrepreneurs engage in when making the future “compulsory”, “desirable” and “plausible”. We contribute to the FM literature by theorizing how entrepreneurs engage with undesirable aspects of the futures. We also extend the entrepreneurship-as-design (EaD) perspective by detailing how constrained environments prompt not just navigation but reconstruction of the problem space. In doing so, we show how designing within limits can become a generative and radical entrepreneurial response in the face of ecological breakdown.
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Faton, C., & Hermans, J. (2025). Designing under constraints: How entrepreneurs make the future in Belgium’s construction industry. Journal of Business Venturing Design, 4, 100033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbvd.2025.100033 (Original work published 2025)