Integrating responsible leadership into entrepreneurship education

As the world emerges from the COVID crisis, the social, economic, and environmental challenges faced by society are more significant than ever. There has been a call for responsible leaders to address these issues across all sectors of society and entrepreneurs have been identified as being core to this process. As such, this chapter investigates and proposes the integration of responsible leadership within entrepreneurship education to help future entrepreneurs step up to their responsibility to tackle global challenges. Drawing upon empirical insight from the responsible leadership research domain, the authors propose four leadership competencies deemed essential for future entrepreneurs, namely, self-awareness, which in turn drives the development of a responsible entrepreneurial orientation, relational intelligence, and sustainability-oriented leadership competencies. These four competencies are the necessary tenets for developing entrepreneurs who have the capacity to lead new firms and address these global issues. Further, given the lack of focus of entrepreneurship education on leadership, the chapter calls for the development of these competencies within the entrepreneurship curriculum.