Operationalising regenerative entrepreneurship through practice theory and life cycle thinking

This paper develops and applies a qualitative framework to examine how regenerative entrepreneurship is enacted in everyday business practice across value chains. Drawing on practice theory and Life Cycle Thinking, we conceptualize regenerative entrepreneurship as an ongoing process in which intent, routines, value-chain positioning, and perceived socio-ecological effects are continually related, rather than as a fixed business model or set of metrics. The framework distinguishes four interrelated dimensions: regenerative intent, practice enactment, life cycle situatedness, and socio-ecological effects, which are used as sensitizing concepts to guide empirical analysis rather than as prescriptive categories. We apply this theory informed, practice based framework in two in-depth case studies of Dutch SMEs in materially intensive sectors: a locally embedded food and beverage company that seeks to restore biodiversity through herb polycultures and inclusive employment, and a bamboo products company that links global sourcing, land restoration, and long-term farmer finance. The analysis shows how regenerative ambitions become selective, situated configurations of practices, shaped by organizational history, available resources, value-chain leverage points, and place-based relations. Across both cases, the framework makes regenerative practices more visible and discussable, surfacing tensions (e.g. between local depth and global reach, or between experimentation and formalization) and revealing where regenerative intent is strong, muted, or contested along the life cycle. We argue that this practice- and life-cycle-oriented view advances regenerative entrepreneurship research by shifting attention from idealized models and impact claims to the concrete ways in which firms organise for socio-ecological regeneration, and by offering practitioners a structured, non-metric approach for reflection and learning.