Digital Entrepreneurship for the “Decade of Action”: How Entrepreneurs Can Impact Our Race Towards the Sustainable Development Goals

In 2020, the UN launched the “Decade of Action” to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the year 2030. As the SDGs are interdependent, intersectional and interdisciplinary, so must be their solutions. This chapter argues that the best way to identify, develop, and scale solutions of such quality is (digital) entrepreneurship, building on the principles of open innovation, cutting-edge technologies, and social business. The COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 in particular serves as a stark reminder of the interconnected nature of the SDGs and the challenges we face in achieving them. In this article, we explore the third SDG (SDG-3), “Good health and well-being”. We show the potential for digital entrepreneurship to foster the rise of new forms of digital health care and to accelerate the digitalization of the healthcare sector. Due to both perceived and real issues of regulatory compliance, user experience, and long investment/equipment use cycles, SDG-3 has been one of the slowest to adopt innovative solutions by far. We discuss specific areas, such as blended reality or quantum computing, for emerging and future digital health applications. In this chapter, we provide: the “memoreBox” of social start-up RetroBrain R&D, a special edition of gamelab.berlin’s app “Singleton”, and D-Wave’s free access to its cloud quantum computing services. All these examples of digital entrepreneurship utilize in whole or in part a combination of open innovation, future and emerging technologies, and social business, thus supporting our rationale. The article closes with recommendations for different stakeholders of entrepreneurial ecosystems, demonstrating both the necessity and the potential of digital entrepreneurship for the SDGs and the “Decade of Action”.