Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Threats in the Era of Grand Societal Challenges

We live in an era defined by attempts to grapple with an ever-expanding array of grand societal challenges (GCs). These challenges comprise transformational social and environmental issues, such as environmental degradation and global pandemics, and the critical barriers toward addressing them. If research ought to prioritize addressing questions that are 'worth answering,' then GCs should not just be a topic of interest for researchers, but the focus of and motivation behind most scholars' research agendas. Management research in particular can and should focus on addressing GCs by examining how individuals, organizations, and societies can and/or do make sense of, navigate, and respond to these sorts of challenges.Critics of business-as-usual often characterize businesses as major contributors to or sources of GCs. However, some businesses instead en-deavor to help address GCs, by reconceptualizing these challenges not as intractable problems but as entrepreneurial opportunities waiting to be tackled, and by developing and/or promoting solutions-oriented and socially responsible in-novations. By asserting their role as key actors in efforts to address GCs, these entities are reorienting perspectives on the almost 50-year-old question, "what is the business of business?"This work consists of three studies, each of which examines a different facet of the ways in which organizations engage with GCs, while addressing internal and external threats. In an attempt to provide a comprehensive and holistic organiza-tional perspective on a topic as large, complex, and characterized by uncertainty as GCs, the core thesis that undergirds these studies is multi-faceted, employing diverse theories drawn from several distinct streams of scholarly literature and discourse, and grounded in both qualitative and quantitative data. Ultimately, though, this work aims to set forth novel and unconventional perspectives on GCs and efforts to address them through management research.