The need for climate action has increased attention to sustainability-focused entrepreneurship. In this context, entrepreneurial firms play a fundamental role in developing high-technology solutions for decarbonization but face funding gaps due to the liabilities of newness and smallness. Despite the importance of signaling in entrepreneurship, little is known about what and how to effectively signal to attract investor interest in small ventures that develop sustainable technologies. To address this gap, the present study is anchored in signaling theory and suggests a topic modeling solution to identify signals presented in company self-descriptions and areas of activity, alongside their investment inputs. Using data extracted from Crunchbase, a corpus of 5099 self-descriptions of small sustainable technology ventures over a period of 10 years, this study provides novel insights into the signaling environment of sustainability-focused entrepreneurship. The study's findings have implications for the sustainability ecosystem, namely, start-ups, small- and medium-sized enterprises, investors, and policymakers.

中文翻译：

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绘制注重可持续发展的创业与投资投入之间的信号环境：主题建模方法

气候行动的需要增加了对注重可持续发展的创业精神的关注。在这种背景下，创业公司在开发脱碳高科技解决方案方面发挥着重要作用，但由于新奇和规模较小，面临着资金缺口。尽管信号在创业中很重要，但人们对如何有效地发出信号来吸引投资者对开发可持续技术的小型企业的兴趣知之甚少。为了解决这一差距，本研究以信号理论为基础，并提出了一种主题建模解决方案，以识别公司自我描述和活动领域及其投资投入中呈现的信号。这项研究利用从 Crunchbase（包含 10 年来小型可持续技术企业的 5099 条自我描述的语料库）中提取的数据，为关注可持续发展的创业的信号环境提供了新颖的见解。该研究的结果对可持续发展生态系统，即初创企业、中小企业、投资者和政策制定者具有影响。