As contributors to our 2026 Case Study Compendium, 'Making the 3Es as easy as A, B, C', Claire Sinclair and Alex Alterskye share how entrepreneurship education could play an important role in developing sustainability competencies among students.
The transition to a net-zero economy is not a distant goal; it’s happening now. The sheer scale of change means that the demand for green skills is rapidly intensifying, with forecasts suggesting the UK alone could see up to 2 million new green jobs by 2030. To meet this challenge, Higher Education must prepare graduates for a working world where sustainable thinking is non-negotiable. Our preliminary study suggests that entrepreneurship education could be a powerful and relevant vehicle for developing crucial sustainability competencies and help work towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Why? Because the nature of entrepreneurship education means our teaching is rooted in practice, with a strong emphasis on collaboration, innovation and solving real-world problems.
Turning grand challenges into bite-sized solutions
The concept of sustainability, often discussed as a daunting “grand challenge“, feels huge and impossible; students sometimes tell us it causes them low-level anxiety. The great benefit of entrepreneurship pedagogy is that it focuses on action; breaking these massive problems down into smaller, solution focussed steps that can feel more manageable and achievable.
Entrepreneurship teaching uses experiential learning methods, requiring students to apply concepts directly through practical activities like creating a business plan, innovating a new product design or delivering a presentation pitch for a new idea. This action-based approach mimics the real-life steps that entrepreneurs go through during new venture creation, and throughout this process students have the opportunity to develop many of the competencies required for future sustainability.
Developing Sustainability Competencies through entrepreneurship education
To test our initial hypothesis that entrepreneurship education could be an important enabler of sustainability competencies, we conducted focus groups with expert higher education entrepreneurship educators to gather preliminary insights into current teaching practices, successes, and structural challenges. They gave us lots of examples of how sustainability competencies are developed within their teaching:
• Problem Solving: Students create value propositions to define the benefit their new venture brings to the market, aimed at solving a societal or consumer problem.
• Systems Thinking: To create a convincing case for investment in their business plans and presentation pitches, students analyse and address the complex macro-environment that surrounds their business ideas.
• Futures Thinking: Students consider the long-term impact of decisions through case studies and the application of strategic planning frameworks.
• Strategic Thinking: Students spend time designing practical, actionable innovations to help achieve long-term sustainability goals.
• Values Thinking: Case studies, guest speakers and field trips to engage with companies where sustainability is inherent to the founder’s vision help to demonstrate how a strong ethical core translates into a successful, innovative company. When students define the value proposition for their own business ideas, educators emphasise that value must move beyond generating profit to encompass generating benefits for society and the environment.
• Interpersonal competence: Through groupwork activities and assessments students experience the benefits and challenges of teamworking and develop essential collaboration and communication skills. Through learning journal-keeping, students reflect deeply on their own professional development and identify improvement actions for the future.
• Implementation competence: The emphasis throughout entrepreneurship education is on the practical application of student innovations. While students don’t usually actually implement their ideas during their education, the experiential nature of the teaching simulates real-life processes as closely as possible.
Challenges
Our focus groups suggested that moving beyond simple sustainability integration and towards deep and focussed sustainability competency development will require addressing several challenges faced by educators and institutions:
• Explicit Objectives are Key: Students may not naturally incorporate sustainable principles unless learning outcomes and module descriptors explicitly mention sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• The Risk of Greenwashing: We must ensure that integrating sustainability doesn’t become superficial “box-ticking” just to appear responsible. This requires educators to think carefully about the case study examples they use and the academic tools and frameworks they adopt, as some traditional tools may be limited when viewed through a sustainable lens.
• The Profit Perception: Educators must manage the tension around commercial ambition. Students sometimes express guilt or reluctance when discussing profit goals, perhaps reflecting an institutional subconscious message that ambition to make money is inherently bad. Entrepreneurship education must demonstrate that being a highly successful, profit-making company can be ethical and sustainable, citing real-life examples of companies where profits are reinvested into environmental causes.
• Structural Barriers: Educators noted that Values thinking and Futures thinking are extremely important for sustainability but may be areas that are currently underdeveloped within current entrepreneurship education, with improvement opportunities often overlooked due to module and programme structure constraints. Entrepreneurship education is embedded in many departments, well beyond the business schools, and as such, this area of teaching transcends traditional disciplinary demarcations. Structural changes may be necessary to fully support innovative teaching, including overcoming rigid departmental staffing structures and fixed credit-bearing modules.
The way forward
These initial findings suggest that the practical, problem-solving focus inherent in entrepreneurial learning could strongly support the acquisition of sustainability skills, even when not explicitly intended. Ultimately, we conclude that entrepreneurship education may be a powerful vehicle for instilling these values and skills, necessitating dedicated future empirical research to measure the relationship between entrepreneurship education and the development of sustainability competencies.
We believe entrepreneurship education could be well-placed to act as a catalyst, helping students acquire the practical skills and the entrepreneurial mindset; a critical curiosity that questions the status quo to drive sustainable change throughout their future careers.
What is the single biggest step your institution plans to take next year to ensure that sustainability competencies are actively developed in your degree programme?
Access the Compendium here:The 3Es: as easy as A, B, C?
Join us at our Employability Symposium 2026, 10 March.
This symposium offers the chance for colleagues to discover new practices, challenge others to progress, and discuss insights into employability in higher education.
The Employability Symposium 2026 aims to bring together cutting-edge examples – such as these case studies – of how employability can be embedded at school, faculty/college and/or institutional levels.
