Designing Understanding: Sustainability Entrepreneurs Connect with Adopters

Sustainability entrepreneurs introduce practices to solve pressing environmental and social problems, but widespread adoption of these sustainability practices by consumers and users is a challenge. This conceptual paper examines "designing understanding" as balancing familiarity with novelty to address this challenge. It develops a typology of designing understanding for the adoption of sustainability practices based on entrepreneurial motivation and adopter preferences, emphasizing the agency of both entrepreneurs and adopters, thereby bridging entrepreneurship with innovation and adoption research. The types differ in framing approaches and adoption effectiveness. We illustrate the typology with examples from sharing practices in the fashion industry.