In a nutshell
Entrepreneurship education must stop treating sustainability and justice as electives. This paper argues for activist pedagogies that bake in purpose at the core, equipping students to transform systems rather than merely succeed within them.
Entrepreneurship education has always been a bit torn. On the one hand, it’s been wildly successful in scaling up – from a single Harvard course in 1947 to over 3000 institutions worldwide. On the other, it’s clung stubbornly to an old script: profit first, venture creation as the end goal, and social or environmental concerns left as optional toppings.
Kickul and colleagues argue this recipe is outdated – and dangerous. With climate breakdown, inequality, and systemic instability looming, tomorrow’s entrepreneurs can’t just be trained to build the next unicorn; they must be equipped to dismantle and rebuild the very systems that produce today’s crises. The authors call this “baking in purpose”. Rather than bolting social and sustainability issues onto an already market-centric curriculum, they propose activist pedagogies that reshape entrepreneurship education from the ground up.
So what does activist pedagogy actually look like? Well, it kind of flips the assumptions. Instead of asking students how to maximise shareholder value, it asks: whose needs are being served, who is excluded, and what unintended harm might follow? Rather than treating profit as the ultimate metric, it reframes financial return as just one ingredient in a broader recipe that includes ecological survival, justice, and collective flourishing.
Publication Date: July 2025
Authors: Jill Kickul, Katrina Brownell, Sonke Mestwerdt, Christoph Winkler
Institutions: Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico); Virginia Tech University (USA); Alliance Manchester Business School (UK); Iona University (USA)
Study Type: Guest editorial / conceptual synthesis
Sample Size: Not applicable
Research Focus: Reimagining entrepreneurship education by integrating social and sustainability principles as core commitments
Research Methodology: Conceptual analysis drawing on activist pedagogies, emerging frameworks, and practical strategies in entrepreneurship education
Main Findings: The authors argue that sustainability and justice must be fully integrated (“baked in”) to entrepreneurship education. Activist pedagogies – including impact-first pitching, stakeholder-inclusive models, community partnerships, and reflective assessment – prepare students to act as systemic change agents. Incremental tweaks are insufficient; a paradigm shift is required.
Citation: Kickul, J., Brownell, K., Mestwerdt, S., & Winkler, C. (2025). Baking in purpose: How activist pedagogies can transform entrepreneurship education for collective impact. Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, 8(4), 511–529. Link
The paper highlights concrete teaching practices that can help make this shift real. Students might be asked to design impact-first pitches, where social change is the opening slide rather than a feel-good afterthought. They might work with stakeholder-inclusive business models that map ecological and community value alongside cash flow. Reflection on unintended consequences becomes a core assignment, not a throwaway footnote. And instead of hypothetical case studies, activist pedagogy pushes students into real partnerships with communities, learning to co-create rather than just extract value.
This approach isn’t without friction, though. Students (and sometimes faculty) may resist, clinging to myths of the lone heroic entrepreneur or feeling discomfort when their assumptions are unsettled. But that discomfort, the authors suggest, is part of the learning. Entrepreneurship is never neutral; it is always situated in systems of power. By embracing this, activist pedagogy turns the classroom into a space for questioning legitimacy itself – whose stories get told, whose innovations get funded, and whose knowledge counts.
If there’s one thing to take away from this paper, it’s that business-as-usual in entrepreneurship education is obsolete. Incremental tweaks won’t cut it; we need a paradigm shift where sustainability and justice aren’t electives but defaults. Kickul et al. frame this not as a prescriptive blueprint but as an invitation to experiment, collaborate, and rethink the purpose of entrepreneurship education altogether. The goal is not simply to produce more entrepreneurs, but to cultivate agents of systemic change. In other words: stop teaching students to win the game. Start teaching them to change it.
Related Research Recap:
The Actual Skills You Need for Sustainable Entrepreneurship — exploring how sustainability and purpose can be fully integrated into entrepreneurship education.
