Research on sustainability entrepreneurship and industry creation often highlights how value-driven agents individually and collectively create significant and lasting change. We attempt to complement these agent-focused approaches by addressing the underlying business-environmental conditions that make participation in industry creation attractive and potentially successful. Accordingly, we emphasize the significance of external factors in fostering sustainability industry creation by applying the external enabler framework. We address how sociocultural, technological and regulatory changes to the business environment, as external enablers, can contribute to creating a sustainability-oriented industry, the empirical example being the potential creation of a viable automotive plastic recycling industry in Australia. We find that while all three types of enablers have important, interacting roles, their direct influence on shaping entrepreneurial action in this domain varies. While the value-based sociocultural pressure toward sustainability may have a fundamental role in driving technology development and regulations toward sustainability, the micro-level agents concerned are variously driven by such concerns and stress much more the need for regulatory measures to make sustainability investments commercially attractive. Further, we find that it is imperative that external enablement is sufficient across all significant roles in the emerging industry. To capture the latter, we introduce the concept of stakeholder comprehensiveness (of external enablement) as an important structural complement to the well-established, agent-focused notion of collective action as crucial in processes of industry creation. In all, our study contributes new insights to research on external enablement, sustainability entrepreneurship, and industry creation.
