The Decolonized Quadruple Bottom Line: A Framework for Developing Indigenous Innovation

Sustainable community development through innovation and entrepreneurship requires vast amounts of knowledge and involves multiple perspectives and contexts. The terms entrepreneurship, innovation, and sustainability have grown to be remarkably broad in context and meaning. These terms appear to be continually changing. For many, entrepreneurship has seemed to only exist in the realm of “for-profit” business; however, over the last several years the term entrepreneurship has emerged to include other contexts, for example green entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable entrepreneurship. This essay examines the potential for further development of entrepreneurship within an indigenous or American Indian framework. A tailored and decolonized model of entrepreneurship—one more culturally relevant for indigenous and American Indian people and nations—potentially provides a perspective that can lead to a more functioning, viable economy for these communities and nations. Furthermore, this new model of indigenous and American Indian entrepreneurship and innovation is grounded in acknowledging the past, but more importantly has the potential to create sustainable indigenous/tribal economies in the immediate future.

The concept of a single bottom line has long been replaced by the triple bottom line of People, Planet, and Profit. The phrase “triple bottom line”—first coined by John Elkington, founder of the British consultancy SustainAbility, in 1994—suggests that companies ought to consider the three Ps: profit, in terms of gain and loss; people, in terms of an organization’s social responsibility; and planet, in terms of an organization’s responsibility to the environment. Elkington contends that an organization must measure each bottom line in order to gain an understanding of the full cost in doing business.¹ What the “triple bottom line” does not incorporate is an acknowledgment of culture or spirituality as a primary role in developing a sustainably sound entrepreneurial model fueled on innovation.

Community development by and for indigenous peoples and their communities has expanded the requirements for success in expressing the need for a quadruple bottom line—a four-faceted theoretical framework that incorporates indigenous concepts and perspectives. It is proposed that through a quadruple bottom line, based on factors unique to the indigenous experience, a specific type of innovation here referred to as Indigenous Innovation can be achieved.

There are several complex challenges related to contextualizing a framework from an indigenous mindset. In the case of American Indian people and nations, part of the challenge resides in the political status American Indian people hold as a result of the tumultuous relationship with the federal government. In most instances worldwide, indigenous people may not hold a similar political status outside their ethnic, social, or cultural presence in that part of the world. What indigenous people and American Indians do hold in common, however, is a shared past of colonization that has driven the direction of these nations and people.

This essay is an attempt to create a model that “decolonizes” the Western view of economic development, innovation, and entrepreneurship and reenvisions a model in which culture is the wellspring of innovation and entrepreneurship and ultimately supports an indigenous/American Indian sustainable economic future. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains,

Decolonization, however does not mean and has not meant a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather, it is about centering our concerns and worldviews and then coming to know and understand theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes.²

The decolonized quadruple bottom line is a framework for innovative strategies toward community development and nation building. This framework is based on the combination of Community, Spirituality, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship, factors unique to indigenous peoples, and is used for sustainable enterprise creation. The overlap or combinations of each of these four factors leads to a subset of Cultural, Social, Economic, and Environmental factors, also very much focused on indigenous perspectives. The overlapping factors located at the epicenter of the quadruple bottom line result in the creation of Indigenous Innovation, which is vital to the development of sustainable indigenous entrepreneurial ventures. This essay will define each of the four main factors of the quadruple bottom...