Exploring the Core Values of Entrepreneurs: A Comparison to the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals

This paper is an exploratory research that builds on existing theoretical and empirical studies in the areas of entrepreneurship and sustainability. Its aim is to gain insights into the extent to which entrepreneurs are engaging in the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (UN 17). It therefore analyzes the core values of 1,467 entrepreneurs to understand the present state of their core values for subsequently comparing them to the UN 17, which we consider as normative. The methods employed include Latent Dirichlet and text data mining. The outcome of the research identifies entrepreneurs as having some degree of engagement with sustainability and that only two of the UN 17, namely education and health, are particularly conspicuous.