Learning apart and together: towards an integrated competence framework for sustainable entrepreneurship in higher education

Abstract

Sustainable entrepreneurs, i.e. those who proactively facilitate latent demands for sustainable development, are now in higher demand than ever before. Higher (business) education can play an important role in laying the foundation for these sustainable entrepreneurs. Traditionally, however, educational scholars focus either on the issue of education for sustainability or on entrepreneurship education. There is little work which explores and/or crosses the boundaries between these two disciplines, let alone work in which an effort is made to integrate these perspectives. In this article, a competence approach was taken as a first step to link the worlds of education for entrepreneurship and for sustainability because we postulate that both, apparently different, worlds can reinforce each other. Based on a literature review, focus group discussions with teachers in higher education (n = 8) and a structured questionnaire among students (n = 211), a set of clear, distinct competencies was developed, providing stepping stones for monitoring students' sustainable entrepreneurship development in school-based environments.