Ethical Leadership : a new frontier for design
Cumulus Conference Proceedings, Nantes, France 2025

Entrepreneurial Syntopia

by Gregory Moulinet

Abstract

How can we redesign our dominant artificial global systems to align with our ecological ceiling and social foundation? This paper examines the entanglement of three dominant global systems—economics, corporate leadership, and industrial infrastructure—each driven by distinct but interconnected paradigms. These paradigms collectively strain the biosphere's regenerative capacity. In response, the paper proposes a strategic redesign of these artificial systems using Donella Meadows' 12 leverage points, specifically through entrepreneurial innovation by fostering physical, metaphysical, and metaphorical “synergistic islands” (syntopia) of regenerative economic, corporate, and industrial systemic structures. These synergistic islands, ethically connected by common biocentric outlook principles, seek to transcend or reduce considerably the corposphere’s systemic dominance while influencing the econosphere and the technosphere to respect and operate within the means of our planet’s ecological boundaries.

KEYWORDS | systemic design, co-design, entrepreneurial synergy, experiential foresight, biocentric ethos