Fit matters - support configurations and sustainability venture survival

The growing urgency of solving worldwide societal and climate change issues through viable business models has intensified research on entrepreneurship support. Despite the expansion of entrepreneurship support, little is known on how different support configurations interact with sustainability venture orientation and founder characteristics to shape survival outcomes. We reposition venture survival as a critical precondition for long-term sustainable impact and introduce a framework for context-sensitive support design that treats venture orientation - distinguishing social from ecological orientation - as a central contextual condition shaping support effectiveness. Addressing the limited attention on heterogeneity and configurational causality in venture survival research, we employ a configurational approach using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Based on a sample of 262 Norwegian ventures and interviews with entrepreneurship support organizations, we show that survival is associated with selectively combined and orientation-aligned support bundles, whereas expansive multi-type support configurations are, in some cases, linked to non-survival. Depending on venture orientation (social vs. ecological), education, and support bundles, we identify distinct configurations associated with both survival and failure, revealing causal asymmetry. Our findings highlight the double-edged nature of entrepreneurship support: while targeted configurations aligned with venture orientation appear to sustain problem-solving and persistence, overly extensive support bundles may crowd out agency and diffuse attention. By demonstrating that support effectiveness depends on configurational alignment rather than additive intensity, this study challenges the assumption that more support is inherently beneficial and advances a context-sensitive perspective on sustainability entrepreneurship support design.