Title: Sustainable entrepreneurship education: a new field for research in step with the 'effectual entrepreneur'

Authors: Jean-Jacques Obrecht

Addresses: EM Strasbourg Business School, F 67000 Strasbourg, France

Abstract: The essay is about entrepreneurship education for sustainable development as a specific research field. It is grounded an enlarged version of Sarasvathy's 'effectual entrepreneur' model. The first part of the paper refers to the identity and knowledge personal capabilities to lay down the basics of SEE (sustainable entrepreneurship education) which will show up to be a variety and complexity-oriented journey. Discovering the variety of entrepreneurial identity should lead to open mind-sets as regards the sustainability issue. Understanding its complexity needs complex knowledge in terms of content as well as of methods. In the second part, the context-related capabilities are called in because they mark the way for the essence of SEE: an unthinkable journey without ethics. Legitimacy is shown to be tied with the necessity of an ethical posture in face of the sustainability market drifts. Proximality shows the ways of relationship-based ethics for change. In the concluding remarks, SEE is called forth as a social issue in reference to regulated sustainability and to participatory sustainability.

Keywords: sustainable entrepreneurship; entrepreneurship education; effectual entrepreneur; entrepreneurial capabilities; relationship-based ethics; sustainable development; sustainability.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2016.078029

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2016 Vol.29 No.1, pp.83 - 102

Published online: 31 Jul 2016 *

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