Beyond Profit: A Data Mining Lens on Sustainable Entrepreneurship in Polish SMEs

TL;DR

Sustainable entrepreneurship is no longer a luxury but a competitive necessity. This study employs K-means clustering to dissect how 410 Polish SMEs actually perform regarding social and ecological goals. The findings are a wake-up call: while social "niceties" are common, deep ecological commitment is rare, and many firms suffer from a "sustainability delusion"—believing they are green when the data suggests otherwise.

The "Profit-Only" Blind Spot

Historically, entrepreneurship was measured by the bottom line. However, the modern market demands a "Triple Bottom Line" approach. The problem is that while many SMEs claim to be sustainable, there is a lack of empirical evidence showing their specific behavioral patterns. This paper seeks to move past self-reported labels to discover the underlying structures of enterprise behavior using data mining.

Methodology: Clustering the Patterns of Sustainability

The researchers utilized a survey tracking two primary indicators: WE (Ecological Goals) and WS (Social Goals).

To process the data, they employed the Orange Data Mining toolbox. Specifically:

• K-means Algorithm: Used to group firms into 5 clusters based on similarities in their goal implementation.
• Silhouette Score: Applied to determine the optimal number of clusters (ensuring that objects within a cluster are similar to each other and different from other clusters).
• MDS (Multidimensional Scaling): Used for visualization to confirm that the clusters were homogeneous.

Figure 1: The Data Mining workflow from survey collection to semantic interpretation.

Key Results: Five Archetypes of Enterprises

The clustering revealed a spectrum of maturity:

1. Cluster C5 (14%) - The Leaders: High performance in both ecological and social dimensions.
2. Cluster C2 & C3 (56%) - The Specialized: Focusing on either green initiatives or social welfare, but rarely both.
3. Cluster C4 & C1 (30%) - The Laggards: Poor implementation across the board.

The Sustainability Delusion

One of the most striking findings is the gap between perception and reality. In the laggard group (C4), 50% of owners claimed they followed sustainable practices, despite their data showing almost zero effective implementation of ecological or social goals.

Figure 2: MDS visualization showing the clear separation of enterprise clusters based on their maturity.

Deep Dive: The Ecological Wall

The data reveals that Ecological Goals (WE) are much harder for SMEs to achieve than social ones.

• Renewable Energy (WE.1): Even in the "Leader" cluster (C5), over 50% struggled with implementing renewable energy sources.
• Water Management (WE.13): This was identified as a major technical and regulatory bottleneck.
• Social Ease: In contrast, social goals like "Safety in the workplace" (WS.5) and "Friendly atmosphere" (WS.8) saw nearly 100% positive implementation among leaders.

Critical Insight & Conclusion

The study highlights that "Sustainable Entrepreneurship" in Poland is currently more of a social movement than an environmental one. SMEs find it relatively easy to be "good employers" (social) but find the transition to being "earth-friendly" (ecological) prohibitively difficult, likely due to a combination of high costs and a lack of legislative incentives.

Takeaway for the Industry: For real progress, we must move beyond the "perception" of being green. Policymakers need to lower the barrier for ecological tech (like water-saving and renewable energy) because SMEs have the will for social sustainability, but they are hitting a financial and regulatory wall when it comes to the environment.

Future Work: The authors suggest investigating the specific industry-level factors that drive these behaviors—asking not just what they do, but what prompts them to change.