Memorandum for Building Entrepreneurial Ethics

Abstract

The objective of this research is to elucidate the necessity of developing an ethics appropriate to the phenomena and contexts addressed in entrepreneurship and to delineate future research directions in the field of entrepreneurial ethics, which currently lacks research. To accomplish this, it is imperative to first identify which aspects of the multifaceted concepts of “entrepreneurship” and “ethics” will be the focus of this study. This research primarily examines the creation and scaling of high-technology and high-growth startups as an “entrepreneurship” phenomenon. The term “ethics” is used in the context of examining moral issues in this field, including not only normative ethics and applied ethics, which refer to the establishment of rules and the explanation of corporate scandals, but also meta-ethics. Furthermore, we delineate the characteristics of entrepreneurship. These characteristics encompass aspects such as high uncertainty, innovativeness, organizational immaturity, psychological characteristics, the power balance between startups and stakeholders, and the absence of norms. We demonstrate that numerous challenging ethical problems inevitably arise from these characteristics. Furthermore, we propose a policy to address these problems. Although this research is not a comprehensive systematic review and therefore has its limitations, it provides a foundation for future research on entrepreneurial ethics.