Sustainable Digital Entrepreneurship: Lived Experiences of Young Women Start-up Founders in Makassar’s Creative Economy Ecosystem

Abstract

This qualitative narrative study explores how young women founders in Makassar’s creative economy practice and conceptualize sustainable digital entrepreneurship. Drawing on interpretive phenomenology, the research examines 14 digital or digitally-enabled start-ups led by women aged 23–35 across fashion, creative content, e-craft, and food-tech sectors. Findings reveal that sustainability is not merely an environmental or economic agenda but a lived orientation integrating cultural values, digital competencies, and social commitments. Participants developed “digital craftsmanship”—the blended mastery of aesthetic curation, analytics, and storytelling—through peer learning, MOOCs, and community experimentation. Sustainability was also enacted through relational capital, including trust-based collaborations with artisans, peer mentorship, and co-branding networks that substituted for formal institutional support. Adaptive financing practices—such as micro-grants, crowdfunding, and reciprocal barter—enabled continuity amid structural barriers like gendered funding bias and algorithmic visibility constraints. The study concludes that sustainable digital entrepreneurship in Makassar is co-produced through hybrid ecosystems where local identity, digital affordances, and ethical intent intersect. Policy implications highlight the importance of gender-sensitive finance, networked learning infrastructures, and participatory ecosystem design to foster inclusive, human-centered innovation within Indonesia’s emerging creative economies.