In a nutshell
Entrepreneurship education tends to put humans at the centre, with nature treated mainly as a resource. A more-than-human approach encourages students to learn from the natural world and rethink how they understand opportunity, value and responsibility.
Entrepreneurship education often teaches students to identify problems, spot opportunities, develop solutions and create value. But who gets to decide what constitutes a problem, an opportunity or value? And for whom? If we really think about it, entrepreneurship is mainly taught from a human perspective, and everything else – the environment, its animals, plants, and ecosystems for example – comes second. These things are mostly understood in terms of what us humans can do with it.
However, this has been getting criticised for some time now. A growing body of research is questioning some of entrepreneurship education’s traditional assumptions, particularly its emphasis on individual success, business growth, and economic value. Critical entrepreneurship education is an approach that asks what kinds of entrepreneurship we’re encouraging and what consequences they might have, and conversations about it are being spearheaded by researchers such as Karen Verduijn, Ulla Hytti and Serxia Lage Arias.
These authors co-wrote this conceptual paper pointing out that humans are not the only beings affected by entrepreneurial decisions, nor do they operate independently of everything around them. They argue for recognising animals, plants, ecosystems and other nonhuman elements as participants in entrepreneurial processes, rather than just resources or background conditions.
So what could this look like when teaching entrepreneurship?
The authors propose an approach in which students learn to pay closer attention to the natural world and their relationships with it. Their framework describes three ways of doing this: attuning to, attuning with, and attuning via. Put simply, these involve noticing what’s happening in nature, engaging with it through activities and experiences, and using what we learn to reconsider our assumptions about entrepreneurship.
Publication year: July 2026
Authors: Karen Verduijn, Ulla Hytti and Serxia Lage Arias
Institutions: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands; University of Turku, Finland
Study type: Conceptual paper
Sample Size: N/A
Research focus: Exploring how entrepreneurship education can move beyond human-centred perspectives by recognising the relationships between humans, other species and ecosystems, and how these perspectives can be incorporated into teaching.
Research Methodology: Theoretical development drawing on entrepreneurship-as-practice, critical posthumanist theory and examples of ecological and multispecies pedagogies in higher education.
Main findings: Verduijn, K., Hytti, U., & Lage Arias, S. (2026). Reimagining entrepreneurship education in the Anthropocene. A critical posthuman practice approach. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 26, e00653. Link
For example, students could study a nearby ecosystem, documenting the interactions between different species, seasonal changes, and signs of human activity. They might work with a community garden or a local conservation project, gaining first-hand experience of how different forms of life depend on one another. These observations could then become the starting point for questions about entrepreneurial activity. How might an understanding of ecological relationships change the way we create value? What would happen if the wellbeing of an ecosystem were taken into account when developing a business idea?
The authors also suggest exploring places where the relationship between human activity and nature is more troubled. Polluted waterways, industrial sites, and communities affected by environmental damage can reveal how economic decisions have consequences for different people, species and environments. Such encounters could encourage students to think more carefully about responsibility, whose interests are considered, and what kinds of entrepreneurial initiatives might contribute to ecological recovery.
Of course, putting these ideas into practice comes with challenges. The authors acknowledge that learning from other species and ecosystems raises difficult ethical questions, particularly around how humans interpret their experiences. University courses also tend to be relatively short, while developing a meaningful understanding of ecological relationships takes time. And since this is a conceptual paper, the proposed teaching approaches have yet to be evaluated for their effectiveness in entrepreneurship education.
Still, the paper offers an interesting perspective on what entrepreneurship education could become. By encouraging students to consider the many relationships that make entrepreneurial activity possible, the authors invite educators to revisit some familiar ideas about opportunity, value, and responsibility. Perhaps the question of who benefits from entrepreneurship deserves a much broader answer than we’re used to giving.
Explore how sustainability and justice can shape entrepreneurial learning in An Activist Turn in Entrepreneurship Education, or discover The Actual Skills You Need for Sustainable Entrepreneurship.
Interested in entrepreneurship beyond financial returns? Explore Social Entrepreneurship for perspectives on social innovation and ethics, or Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries to examine entrepreneurship’s role in economic, social and ecological sustainability.
