Welcome from the Chair


Prof. Lotfi Belkhir
Chair of Eco-entrepreneurship
W. Booth School of Engineering Practice & Technology
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, CANADA

As the Chair of the International Conference Sustainable Entrepreneurship, it is with great pleasure that I invite you to attend this unique and watershed event in the attractive city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, from 28-30 August 2019.

The inaugural launch of ICSE 2019 starts a movement to build sustainability into the DNA of every entrepreneurial initiative. Our central theme of Sustainable Entrepreneurship is no longer about fostering a branch of entrepreneurship such as Greentech; instead, it is about entrepreneurship done right: economically; socially, and environmentally right! It’s about every entrepreneur becoming a sustainable entrepreneur, and rising up collectively to the defining challenges of our time such as the climate crisis, widescale poverty and rampant diseases. In short, it is about innovating a carbon-free economy within a socially just society in a flourishing planet

ICSE 2019 will bring together academics, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, investors, businesses and all concerned stakeholders from around the world to deliver and share the latest research, best business practices, cutting-edge tools and frameworks, and finally the insightful policies that will equip the innovators and entrepreneurs of the present and the future to rise up to the greatest challenge of our time; the Sustainability Challenge. In addition to the traditional parallel sessions, ICSE 2019 will consist of keynote lectures, panel discussions, and workshops from internationally-renown experts in their respective fields.

In keeping with this theme, we invite Academic papers, workshop proposals, practitioner cases and provocative expositions in the areas of:

  • Circular economy
  • Sustainable regional development
  • Environmental regulations, policies and certifications
  • De-carbonizing the supply chain
  • Sustainable energy
  • Low-carbon economy
  • Bio-mimicry
  • Smart cities
  • Clean-tech
  • Impact investing
  • Design for sustainability
  • Managing for sustainability
  • Sustainable Organizational Leadership
  • Women entrepreneurship
  • Sustainability-through-service innovation
  • Digitally-enabled sustainable business models
  • Sharing economy
  • Indigenous entrepreneurship
  • Academic-Industry partnerships towards the UN’s SGDs
  • All other emerging and enabling concepts with a sustainability focus.

The conference will run from Aug 28-30 and will be divided into plenary sessions in the morning and breakout sessions in the afternoon. Each plenary session will consist of keynote speakers and panel discussions and the breakout sessions will include both academic papers and practitioners’ presentations. 

ICSE Academy: The ICSE Academy will take place on August 28, and will consist of several practical workshops that will provide the attendees the tools, methods and frameworks that will enable the embedding of sustainability into the DNA of a nascent company, in a way that becomes a lens for innovation and a source of competitive advantage.

Please join us and contribute by leaving your mark in this game-changing event that we hope will ignite the Sustainable Entrepreneurship Movement.

We look forward to welcoming you in Montreal on August 28, 2019.

 

Prof. Lotfi Belkhir
Chair of ICSE 2019