How to educate for sustainable entrepreneurship?

An emergent discourse portrays environmental and societal challenges attributed to market failures as entrepreneurial opportunities, which, if exploited, can improve global conditions, reduce market imperfections, and generate entrepreneurial rent (Cohen and Winn, 2007; Dean and McMullen, 2007, Hall et al., 2010). Knowledge of these market imperfections can lead to entrepreneurial innovations and entrepreneurial rent, as well as alleviate harmful environmental or societal impacts (Cohen and Winn, 2007). Specifically, market imperfections related to efficiencies, externalities, pricing, and information generate numerous entrepreneurial opportunities (Dean and McMullen, 2007). For instance, inefficient production processes can lead to significant waste and pollution in the economic system. Innovative entrepreneurs focusing upon resource efficiency, waste minimization, and technology development may reduce harmful environmental impacts whilst at the same time reducing production costs. Changes occurring in the natural environment, and the growing attention to, and understanding of these changes can redefine firms markets. These changes can generate additional opportunities in the marketplace. The mobilization of informational advantages can lead to the creation and development of new and existing markets. Notably, entrepreneurs that discover and exploit opportunities that are present in existing market imperfections may garner entrepreneurial rents, while reducing environmental degradation and promoting national and regional development and competitiveness. However, the continuing trend towards greater environmental resource scarcity and dynamism in many industries (i.e., competitive pressures, high costs of technology, scarcity of information etc.) adds challenges for these opportunities to be developed, or even explored. Many view sustainability – the balancing of economic health, social equity and environmental resilience (Cohen and Winn, 2007), as a constraint (e.g. due to increased bureaucracy and costs of imposed standards), rather as an opportunity that may generate entrepreneurial rent.

Entrepreneurship education encourage the development of skills that enable entrepreneurs to discover and exploit economic opportunities in rapidly changing and unpredictable industry environments. The benefit of entrepreneurship education has been widely recognized. However, impact studies have predominantly focused on short-term and subjective outcome measures of entrepreneurship education like entrepreneurial attitude, skills and intentions to start a business (Nabi et al., 2017). The promising view of entrepreneurship as a potential panacea for some environmental and societal challenges has often been overlooked in the entrepreneurship education literature, however with some noteworthy exceptions. Lans et al. (2014) link the world of education for entrepreneurship and for sustainability to identify key competences of sustainable entrepreneurs like opportunity recognition skills, systemthinking, interpersonal skills including the ability to embrace diversity and interdisciplinary, foresighted thinking and proactivity. This is one-step forward to develop education in the intersection between entrepreneurship and sustainability, yet the need for knowledge regarding how to educate to enable the discovering and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities inherent in environmental and societal challenges is still evident.

In this PDW, the participants will explore the underlying problems of developing entrepreneurship education in a manner that encourage and enable the discovering and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities inherent in environmental and societal challenges that, if exploited, improve environmental and social welfare. We argue that the challenge of developing entrepreneurship education in this context becomes particularly complex since entrepreneurs will not only be in need for diverse skills, but because entrepreneurial thought and action is needed on the society and industry levels as well as for individual companies and entrepreneurs. The levels are often interrelated but no coordinated. Notably, this workshop seeks to find answers to questions such as: What do the students need to learn? What should the students do in order to learn? How should learning be facilitated? Using wayfaring as a method, participants will be encouraged to reflect upon, and discuss, the effectiveness of diverse learning methods, and hopefully this will enable and encourage further exploration and development of learning methods.