Educating Change Agents for a Sustainable Future: What Role Can Entrepreneurship Education Play?

Entrepreneurship has long been recognized as crucial for economic and social development. Today, entrepreneurship as a field may be more important than ever, due to the global challenges we are facing and the new ideas and solutions we need in order to achieve sustainable development. Thus, it is important that educators equip students with the competence and knowledge they need, in order to address global challenges in a holistic way. The overall aim of this chapter is to shed light on how experience-based teaching methods can be used to encourage students’ engagement for sustainable entrepreneurship. The study is primarily relevant in relation to SDGs 1 (no poverty), 8 (decent work and economic growth), and 11 (sustainable cities and communities). The study is based on an entrepreneurship course, where master’s students at a Norwegian university were exposed to a new and unfamiliar cultural/geographical context in a rural area in India. Two cohorts of students were studied. The first group traveled to India as part of the course, while the second group of students took the whole course online but were introduced to the same teaching and to the same rural context. Individual interviews with all students were conducted three times—before, during, and after the field work. Data were coded inductively, aiming to detect central themes related to students’ learning and their reflections around the exposure to an unfamiliar context. Results show that the students who physically traveled to India found the field visit central to their ability to understand entrepreneurial challenges at both micro and macro levels. The students reported that they both learned to identify problems and solutions in the specific place they visited but also that they got a better understanding for global challenges of today, due to exposure to an underprivileged community in the global south. The students who took the course online similarly expressed that they learned to identify problems and solutions but were less devoted to really find solutions for the specific community. These findings shed light on the role of entrepreneurship education and the fostering of change agents who are willing to commit to sustainability solutions for the future. This can help in developing pedagogical tools, specifically regarding experience-based learning tools.