Driving sustainability from within : an empirical exploration of sustainable intrapreneurship

Abstract

Organizations increasingly commit to sustainability, yet practitioners often lack mandate, budget, and shared metrics to turn these pledges into day-to-day IT change. This thesis examines sustainable IT intrapreneurship through ten semi-structured interviews with IT and sustainability practitioners in Finland, Spain, Germany, and Brazil, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The factors that motivated, enabled, or challenged practitioners were predominantly structural, cultural, and commercial, not technical. Five strategy themes were identified, making the argument, creating capacity without permission, integration, navigating power and relationships, and building the knowledge base, all sharing one logic: sustainability advances by riding on vehicles the organization already trusts, such as a compliance mandate or an existing workflow, instead of being argued for as a value in its own right. Eight factor–strategy links were present in three or more participants, showing which constraints call forth which workarounds, and these are distilled into a standalone practitioner field guide. Overall, practitioners advance sustainability by translating it into terms the organization already accepts and rewards.